I think the "private website" space is shrinking - despite what adverts for Wix and Squarespace might infer.
The consumer/blog space of geocities, tripod and the like went to social media. Then we went through a period of "businesses putting up 10 pages for a fixed price" through first of all "a local web guy" then by themselves using Wix/WP/SS etc.
I've just had a bathroom fitted by a guy who functions purely on Instagram for his portfolio and Whatsapp for communication. As I'm old and curmudgeonly I wanted an email address, and when I got it, it's the one that came free with his phone.
Even local restaurants seem to be changing - using aggregators as their primary touch-point. Can't really blame them. They can easily submit their static stuff
- opening times, location and menu - and the complex stuff like a booking system, taking deposits, sending calendar reminders is just handled by a single entity who's good at this stuff.
WP seems to occupy this weird middle-ground I don't see as being attractive to anyone. As a light user there are dedicated CMS for your industry - for the hardcore, you hand-build it. WP, paying for packages, and being on the hook when they don't play nice - Who-tf is the target market?
I was previously a PM at a company where I got to interview a lot of content creators on various platforms (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc). Specifically creators with large enough followings where it was their sole source of income (typically $1K-$10K per month).
I was initially shocked by how few of them had personal websites, but they're able to get by with the tools that the platform provides them. They didn't see much ROI in maintaining a personal site, and were more concerned with diversifying their audience across platforms.
Even where you might once have thought "I'll add my own site, for the true fans, and take in orders of magnitude more money" - Now you can just add patreon (or an onlyfans) that handles that for you far more efficiently.
Then there are more niche providers like Floatplane (the Linus Tech Tips side-hustle/life-boat), who'll give you more autonomy and a CDN.
LinkTree was when the penny really dropped for me. Pretty much just an API landing page to point you to the other platforms.
Maybe the only next step left, is stuff like https://nametag.org/ - using an NFT to be your presence.
It's all very odd, and as I said above, makes me feel very old.
I look at some of the channels I've subscribed to on YouTube - I have absolutely no idea if any of them have a personal website, since I have never had a reason to check.
Sharing this experience. Having a few friends who have small gardening or construction businesses, but none of them have a website. If I ask why, they tell me they already have too much work. A website or any kind of marketing on top of mouth to mouth would only add on top of that.
For years now, I've seen many restaurants rely on an Instagram account instead of an actual website. It's definitely easier for them to create an IG account than to pay someone (or a service) for a website. Also, posting to IG lets them market to their audience (instead of posting it to a website that presumably fewer people visit).
Shame since I often want to view their menu, and IG is really aggressive about not showing you profiles & images unless you login. Viewing their menu on a 3rd party site (Google Maps, Yelp, delivery services, etc) is subpar and often out of date.
So it sounds like the restaurants are overestimating how well an instagram account responds to their needs. Maybe they do need to invest in a more traditional web page after all. I'll happily disregard any restaurant that forces me to log on whatever platform to view their menu.
I think some of this is the result of how terrible Google search has gotten, although it maybe a chicken and the egg issue. It is just so much easier to find small businesses/individuals on social media/aggregators than on Google.
> I've just had a bathroom fitted by a guy who functions purely on Instagram for his portfolio and Whatsapp for communication. As I'm old and curmudgeonly I wanted an email address, and when I got it, it's the one that came free with his phone.
And work in anything international and this is essentially it. Want to find a smoothie shop in a beach town in Mexico? Instagram/FB + WhatsApp...thats it.
You've nailed it. RIP WordPress and websites. <sarcasm>Delete that Safari icon, it's annoying.</sarcasm>
Fewer people are opening web pages on their phones. I was wondering why someone would pay so much for a website, and then realized accessing twitter through a web browser on a laptop is not the way. We won't talk about relinquishment of rights, privacy and freedom. I am a curmudgeon doing it all wrong. The way into the walled garden is through the ease of use of popular Apps on the most popular platform: the phone.
WP is just very famous so clients often require it and know it. I don't think it has ever been choice developers would go for if they didn't have to.
But other newer crop of CMSes - Craft, Ghost, Kirby, Twill, October, Grav... they don't have the legacy baggage and are just so much better for fully custom made sites. You basically get light web framework with super customisable admin.
On the other hand for the "quick marketing site builder" - WP is getting eaten by Webflow and also Wix and their new new builder.
Last nail to the coffin is that WP has become big target of hackers and its just hustle to keep it going compared to most other self hosted solutions.
I don't think its websites going away so much as it's WP loosing to alternatives.
IMO Wordpress is very much in the domain of the SEO / Adwords crowd. People that want their site to rank and bring in traffic for ads. There are millions upon millions of domains that people want to make money on.
I'd also add that the rise of cloud computing hasn't helped either. WP was great when hosting consisted of shared LAMP services or hosting your own. But WP is a huge pain in the arse to host on services like AWS (as well as expensive too). So lots of companies that might have opted for a CMS solution like WP could easily be swayed to another alternative. While this wouldn't be the biggest contributing factor -- it's a drop in the ocean compared to the points you've raised -- it is yet another example of how the industry is moving on from WP style content.
As a business owner I can tell that a business can be pretty successful with just a Facebook page, an Instagram profile and Whatsapp as a contact channel. No website needed.
Unfortunately, websites cannot compete with aggregators. It's not about tech, it is about people.
Aggregators have the only thing a business need to thrive: people. If you have a "private website", you need to drive people to it, but if you have an account on a platform, people are already there.
This is why more and more businesses rely on aggregator instead of having a "private website".
I see saying, blogs have definitely been shrinking. The web is too large and complex to be discovered unless your service is within one of the 5 or so major social platforms. To own a domain is almost a status symbol, letting users know “we are an established entity”.
It’s pretty revealing when a local bar cover band or a Chinese restaurant has its own website. It’s almost always decrepit in maintenance and low traffic (as if it could handle more).
Wordpress, Blogspot, and all these other template engine/blog platform things were the Web 2.0 answer, but I don’t think those types of services are going away. It’s a skill to implement a modern site not many people want to learn or hire when these platforms exist. Plenty of domain sites are powered by them. I just think this post is a telltale sign Wordpress is in a saturated market.
The fact that we’ve overcomplicated the skill set needed to maintain a “modern” website has helped contribute to this problem. A static website could be so bloody simple. Just save a bloody Word document to HTML with your pictures and menu and telephone number and open hours and links to maps and upload it to a folder. But… Even basic file handling skills are becoming uncommon.
> I think the "private website" space is shrinking - despite what adverts for Wix and Squarespace might infer.
The fact that Wix and Squarespace have been advertising hard for a time, is a sign that they see the market approaching saturation, or shrinking, or both, and they are fighting the market (trying to drum up more interest) and each other (to get the bigger share of what is left).
> WP, … Who-tf is the target market?
People who don't like (or have available) an industry specific preferred solution nor the time to DIY, who have not yet hit the point of realising that growing with WP can be as time consuming as DIY.
I think the real target market is plugin developers, who love the fact that you can get people to pay annual subscriptions for plugins providing some of the most mundane features I have ever seen.
Serious businesses don't go after the "free" concept, but prefer to pay thousands of dollars using CMS that well-known and experienced companies design and implement.
An example of such CMS for dedicated industries would be Adobe Experience Manager [1], previously known as Adobe CQ5.
Auto dealerships are a good example. They are run by some local guy who gets a little bit of support from corporate and probably has a low cost marketing agency. But none of them use Wordpress as there are CMSs for the industry. I don’t remember the old ones but the new startupy one is actually awesome but cannot seem to find their company name.
We can make assumptions all day but for me, the worst thing about WordPress is EASILY Plugin Hell.
I can update all plugins this morning and they all want updates by the end of the day.
And then when they break it’s a disaster.
WordPress itself needs to take a chill pill too.
Leave a version out for a year or more, and only small security patches. In the last year, I think we’ve seen block widgets, JQuery migrate nightmares, that new blocks theme thing, and more. I just want them to back off already.
It’s a nightmare keeping hundreds of clients up to date.
The WordPress codebase is a disaster, and the problem is self-compounding. The founders / core have found success writing disastrous code, and as such have no impetus to be aware of the benefits of higher quality - this is largely because (as you point out) the model of development shifts the burden to small individual website makers deploying (& maintaining / firefighting) WordPress.
Since it's open-source, a disastrous codebase could be "fixed" over time if experienced engineers were willing to join and contribute to the project over time, but the culture of QA-ignorance among existing core contributors has a tendency to exasperate experienced engineers.
I'm not saying it's a "toxic" culture per se - it's very open, and especially welcoming of new / inexperienced / beginner contributors, which is certainly cool for learning. But once contributors gain a little knowledge they go one of either two ways: knowledge-stagnation (enough to contribute but not to improve), or exasperation (enough to know how to improve but lacking motivation to make that uphill battle).
The culture from core extends to the plugins, not only because there's overlap in devs, but also because the APIs the plugin community have to use are garbage. This means many of the popular plugins - while they may have high-quality UX and design - have very poor code behind that.
All the above means that WordPress needs constant small fixes contributed by an army of devs to prevent it falling over / getting hacked, which massively increases the update frequency: there's nothing preventative within it's architecture, it's all reactive patches. It also means it'll only be a viable platform as long as its extremely popular: once popularity decreases a little, the maintenance burden will be far too high for the smaller community to sustain, and existing installs are going to be even more vulnerable than ever.
WordPress backend code is insane, but it is one of the few systems in widespread usage where you can reliably reverse engineer your way to solving bugs or making changes with minimal knowledge and effort.
There are so many JavaScript first systems in use today that are practically impossible to debug / modify without complete intimate knowledge of the codebase.
I've been looking at replacing my project's website with Hugo (https://gohugo.io). Rather than generating a web page dynamically every time someone comes to your site, you generate the entire website statically whenever you change something. That means hosting can be entirely a "dumb" web server (or a "dumb" web server + apis which feed info to javascript, if you really need it). It also means:
* you can keep everything in version control to roll things back
* content can be fed to it programmatically
* project members can send pull request to post content, rather than requiring a special account
I've only gone through some examples from a book so far, but it looks pretty powerful, and is has good recommendations from others in the community.
I don't (yet) have a personal web presence, but if I do, it will definitely be something like Hugo.
Publii is an alternative to publish a simple blog for free without paying for hosting from your own computer. It's much, much more simple and limited than WordPress, but this is its strength for some people.
I have been running a few WordPress sites for like 10 years now and never had any of them randomly break, I just use a few core plugins and two premium themes and update them once in a while.
I pay a small amount extra a month for my host to manage upgrades of my own WordPress sites and common plugins, I keep things simple on purpose to minimise the plugin hell you mention.
As much as I can do this myself, I can't guarantee timely updates as a private individual.
I've migrated 2 WP sites (one for work, one for a local club) to github pages to reduce the maintenance pain of WordPress.
Wix and Squarespace are imo infinitely harder to make look good/maintain than Wordpress (at least without Gutenburg). Just some basic tasks are needlessly difficult or impossible. I still think Wordpress is the go-to easy to build/maintain CMS.
IMO, I think Automattic introduced Gutenberg way too soon to Core and introduced it as very half baked. Still to this day it's very half baked to an incredible degree, some pages will just break outright and resort to JSON errors, not to mention the built in blocks are awful and 3rd party blocks often break. That probably turned off a lot of people. It's still easier to just buy a theme that has a built in page builder and you'll get similar Lighthouse scores to Gutenburg (this being for average users, not custom themers, etc).
The problem with Wordpress isn't the ease of use, its the constant maintenance required. If you are a local restaurant, you don't need an extremely powerful and flexible framework. You need something that is always online, doesn't get hacked, doesn't have its certificates expire, doesn't run out of disk space because of a log file, doesn't get stuck on a 5 year old debian, etc.
If you have to pay a little more to have someone fiddle with squarespace for twice as long as they would wordpress, that's ok because its now set and forget.
agree that the non-stop overly frequent maintenance is a serious pain point for site owners and developers.
Also agree with GP that gutenberg has been ruining WP since it was shoved into core, for many reasons.
If the classic-press fork of WP is still a thing it'd be better for most people.
Glad to see they are working with a performance team now.
Currently I find it best use one of the wordpress-to-static plugins to have a design spit out into static html and use that. (which then you can zip/archive and delete all the php / gutenberg / logins etc) It's safer and faster.
of course you would lose comments and easy client updates going static, and may need a contact form chunk of code to add after the fact in some cases - but it's my current suggestion.
Wordpress doesn't actually require that much maintenance at all, I feel like this is a myth or because people have only dealt with very old Wordpress builds. Wordpress now has automatic updates built into it, and large agencies or companies automate updates otherwise.
I don't understand your certs expiring, etc comment. That is because of your host if anything, and even the worst host now offer with Cloudflare or Let's Encrypt.
I've never heard of Wordpress eating up disk space due to a log file, sounds fairly made up tbh. I've had a log file eat up disk space from a poorly built custom CMS though, because it presented so many errors in the Apache logs. Hosts now maintain and update the Linux/Windows distros fairly regularly, and even when I ran dev/web ops you could automate this type of thing easily.
Does the wordpress commercial offering not solve this issue ? Maybe I am wrong, but I understood it also as setup and forget. Any users of wordpress.com could provide more information..
The subjective part is "look good". I've sent at least a dozen small business to Squarespace and helped them get it tuned -- the look has always been "good enough" for them to move on to real business problems. It gets their information into Google (et al), provides the domain to link to from their IG, FB, Twitter, etc, etc -- so those traffic sources resolve to their own main truth.
I’ve replaced about five or six different WP installs with square space now. Never had a problem with it looking good, and surely don’t miss the increased vulnerability footprint that comes with hosting WP.
The only people I know who hate Wordpress are the developers who have had the misfortune of having to manage an instance of Wordpress. All the marketing and content people I have worked with love it.
This. I have a sales person and a designer that maintain our Wordpress instance. I login to the admin panel once every few months. Mostly these people do everything by themselves.
Among the things they've done recently:
- a major web site redesign (custom styling and look)
- added translations (via a plugin)
- updated how we gather analytics
- added a hubspot integration
I don't know many platforms where that can happen without technical people getting involved. All the next best options are SAAS platforms like shopify, squarespace, hubspot, etc.
None of us have any php skills (well, I deny having them and tend to not touch it). It's not perfect. But it's there and it works. For me the main value is that it can do what it does without me needing to be involved. We spend a few days setting it up at some point and making sure it gets updates. That's it.
It's not surprising wordpress market share is declining. I'd actually recommend new companies to pick one of the SAAS options. Even with wordpress, getting somebody else to host it for you is probably wise (there are a few good companies in this space).
WordPress is stupid easy to wrangle into what you want it to. That's the best thing about it and the worst, because you have a bunch of people who have no idea what they're doing doing high-profile things. As a freelancer, WordPress paid for my house. Naysayers are just elitists without a cause.
You can add to that "people who manage web hosting servers".
Across our fleet, disabling hacked instances is a routine event. There is often a marketing person that wants to argue - according to their industry, WordPress is leading the security space. It's incredible how different industries view the product.
> according to their industry, WordPress is leading the security space
It's not the marketing industry. It's just that some people have this tendency of conflating popularity with supreme quality. "It can't be bad if it's popular".
Specialists in the marketing industry knows very well that outdated Wordpress is a minefield.
And SOC/CSIRT folks. A staggering amount of incidents involve an external wordpress install used as free real estate by threat actors in some way (e.g. phishing kit, malware infra).
Wordpress code base is the best argument for the MVC design pattern specifically because it shows what goes wrong when you toss the idea of encapsulation out the window.
I wouldn't specifically say "MVC"; one could argue it's the best argument for many design patterns or QA approaches, as it flagrantly ignores all of them.
I've done some Wordpress consulting work in the past. I wouldn't say I hate Wordpress. I advocate for it's use in some cases! I think it is a fantastic piece of software for what it natively does.
You want a blogging platform? Wordpress is one of the best, hands down. You want a basic CMS that is so dead simple that anyone that can use a word processor can update the website? Wordpress excels at this, because that is what it was designed to do.
But I do think it is a poor solution in a lot of cases where it has been shoehorned into. People keep grafting so much extra, unnecessary crap onto what is still, at it's core, a blogging platform. Often this is done by low-skill, low-paid "consultants" with very little experience in writing maintainable, secure code. Literally all they know how to do is write Wordpress code. I would often end up having to clean up the mess from these folks, who often still write PHP like it's 2007 and they haven't learned better [0].
Wordpress's architecture has, until relatively recently, encouraged this behavior. Their stubborn refusal to move beyond PHP 5 for many years (and continuing to support absolutely ancient versions of PHP 5 at that!) held their entire ecosystem back from writing better, more secure code for a long, long time. And, more broadly, held PHP as a whole back, as they were among its largest players. It was really hard to make the case for hosts to upgrade PHP when Wordpress still supported whatever ancient version of PHP the host was providing. Their internal architecture can be very messy in places and documentation often contradictory about what the "correct" or even preferred way to do something is because there are multiple ways implemented at different times.
I will give them credit: Wordpress itself doesn't have too many gaping security holes anymore. Most of those has been patched. It's the plugins and themes that provide the attack surface now.
The public plugins themselves (and to a lesser extent the themes) are of such widely variable quality that it is difficult to know what to use and trust. You're probably okay with the "official" plugins and most of the widely-installed third party plugins, but you get too far off the beaten path, you find a lot of garbage (and, to be fair, a few gems as well). And any custom plugin I find is immediately suspect for the reasons above. Building a theme? Which of these multiple ways of user customization do you support? All of them? None of them? Or do you just write your own customization further messing up the UX for writers and editors who have little idea how to manage Wordpress beyond the very basics of writing a post.
Oftentimes when I would come into a Wordpress case, there's 30 or so plugins installed, half of which are disabled and you have no idea what is causing the client's problem. It takes a few hours just to untangle the mess, and you can't ask the last "consultant" because they wrote garbage code, threw it over the wall and disappeared. It's the reason I usually don't take Wordpress cases anymore unless it's someone I know or an installation I did, myself, from scratch that hasn't been messed with by anyone else.
Wordpress is a great blogging platform and basic CMS. It's when people start trying to make it do things beyond this that problems start to accrue. I don't hate Wordpress. I hate what people try to do with it.
When Wordpress is your hammer, everything looks like a custom post type.
> It's when people start trying to make it do things beyond this that problems start to accrue.
Ugh, that just serves to remind me of the unholy, demented shapes I've seen (Fortune 500) companies are able to mangle SharePoint into. Customizability is usually a nice quality in general, but certainly not without any cost.
Let me be a SOB for a second and ask for your opinion. I'm interested in freelancing with WordPress, mostly small company websites, would you still recommend it for someone who's just getting in the market?
I wonder how the code looks like. Back in pre PHP5 days, it was surprisingly painful to read their docs (globals and side effects) and plugins source was just shocking. Angry 17yo levels of dirt loc (and that's insulting to 17yo)
...which is sort of like saying "the only people who hate Wordpress are the people who have to use it."
It's legit AWFUL. It's a reasonable blog engine, sure, but it's been forced into being a general CMS, and it was never built for that. Our corp site is on it, and I fucking HATE it (fortunately I rarely have to deal with it).
My personal blog (21 years old and counting) has been through a bunch of platforms (Blogger, Greymatter, Blosxom) before settling on Wordpress. As I said, as a blogging tool, it's mostly fine. I don't really HATE it there, but it's still too fiddly for my tastes.
The other cohort of people who hate Wordpress are marketing/content people who've had the pleasure of using an install that lacks full-time developer maintenance for long enough for it to break, and being "stuck" with that breakage (or, worse, wading into the freelance market trying to find someone to fix it without a scratch rewrite).
The matches my experience. They can manage whatever web of crazy they want in Wordpress… if they need something from the dev side we can play with some plugins until it works.
Sometimes the answer is “oh god we can’t do that”… and that seemed to be ok if we had some alternatives
WordPress will continue losing market share for the simplest reason: people fed up with the coercion of Full-Site Editing (FSE) by Automattic.
Community's reaction via comments' section [1] for Gutenberg plugin was a clear indication that people will eventually go away, had they not revoke their decision.
They haven't which led to the fork [2] of WordPress thus dividing the community, at least for a while.
Had they listened to their community to acquire Elementor and make it part of WP core, things would have been a lot better today than they currently are I'm afraid.
They have wasted countless resources and valuable time that could be poured in improving Elementor and WordPress in general.
I have tried to find tutorials, articles, and books about using FSE and couldn't find anything updated.
I used to tell people WP is a solid base to build your website if you know what you're doing, but with Gutenberg and not knowing how much longer the Classic Editor plugin will be supported I keep my WP praise to myself.
Currently I'm learning Laravel, because I have dealt with a lot of WordPress custom development and had lots of headaches, especially with multilanguage support.
I find it incredible it does not support such a standard feature and you are forced to buy a plugin that is actually a CMS written as a plugin...we are talking about an Inception type of thing, if you think about it with the whole CMS inside a CMS!
4 years ago my team built out a new CMS website for a large media company that had many different sub brands and multiple language requirements. We did a lengthy comparison against a big range or CMS solutions, we found Django CMS https://www.django-cms.org/en/ fulfilled all our requirements the best.
After having used it for years I can say it's an excellent product. Easy to setup, easy to learn (any Django dev can pick it up almost instantly), secure, has LTS versions. It's just an excellent CMS. It's the first product I reach for now when needing a CMS system.
I am not affiliated with Django CMS in any way, I just really love their product.
For the non-dev user, Gutenberg takes longer and is more fiddly to do what the old editor used to do, breaks a lot of old themes/plugins, and makes it harder and harder to use the old editor/themes/and similar.
For the developer, WordPress used to be really easy to make add-ons for and customize. Now you need to know React to get the most of of WordPress, and if you're going to go through the trouble to get good with React, what are you going to do, use it to maintain WordPress sites or go get paid more to do React development?
Gutenberg and the changes associated with it do make a better site — but people didn't want a better site, they wanted a better WordPress.
They forced it down to people's throats without listening to anyone's reactions or objections.
I have tried to learn how to use it and have lost counting how many times they changed how it works as a whole.
You have no idea how excruciatingly painful is for me to use it that I have 22 years of professional experience with computers; imagine how non-tech savvy users feel when they try to use it!
Not all people are computer literate or are interested in technology in general, what they don't understand?!
Users want a tool to do their job and they want it to be stable, safe, and robust; don't change this concept or you will lose them on the spot, PERIOD!
Instead of letting Gutenberg as a plugin it originally were (well, technically it still is offered as a plugin, but that's another story) - so people can choose whether to use it or not - they forced it to the community and on top of that they are working non-stop on implementing new mechanisms or ideas that cancel previous features, thus leading to a mad chaos.
Do you have the same impression: Each and every plugin/extension has a commercial pro version that keeps on nagging to buy its extended warrenty ... sorry, no, to subscribe to updates for just 29.99 each, right? So 29.99 for instagram connections, 39.99 for backups pro (i'm making names and prices up, but you know the drill.) and for just 20 dollars more a security/virus check for ... what?!?!
are you f**king kidding me?
I've started to use pelican. It creates a flat file-based website with all I need. (See: https://blog.getpelican.com/)
It's not just the plugins, this culture seeps into just about every guide about Wordpress. Read any guide and it's almost never a person that is just offering helpful advice, it's almost always some SEO spam that leads you on only to hit you with "buy my services/plugins/etc to fix this problem".
Last time I did any work around WP this drove me insane. I remember trying to setup backup or something else simple and I was loosing my mind because there wasn't a single guide that just told you how to do it, they all beat around the bush and eventually the post just turns into a sales copy for their plugin/service/other overpriced bullshit.
Coming from the JS ecosystem, you realize just how different the culture is. Sure there are professional services in the JS ecosystem that cost money, but there's plenty of folks that are just trying to pay it forward and be helpful to the community, even the companies are good stewards. With Wordpress no, everyone is just out to make a quick buck selling you on something.
And it was uncovered that not only are people who are in close to the main development focused on releasing premium paid upgrades that require yearly fees - I contend that they are also holding back what should be basic styling options from being available in core as well.
Honestly, those prices you mentioned are peanuts for a business customer.
We'll pay something like US$30k/year in eBay fees (including paid promotions) for a relatively small home-based operation. We're moving to a warehouse soon, so that might be another $20k/year in rent.
$30/year to solve a real problem our business has is a steal compared to this!
The fact you are being downvoted for saying this tells me more about the kind of people criticizing WordPress because of Gutenberg/update_cycles/but_what_about_bad_plugins/i_am_the_only_one_who_knows_hwo_to_write_good_wordpress_code_and_everyone_else_suck_at_this_but_me in this thread.
Are you running a basic blog? We have some WordPress sites that are sorta unloved, but they are able to use these commercial plugins for a few hundred bucks to enable custom forms, payments, event ticketing, event calendars and they're just one-click installs and some CSS.
> If WordPress is shrinking, something else must be growing, this is, after all, a zero sum game. The very clear winners at the moment are Wix and Squarespace.
But the authors conclusion, that WP's loss gives points to Wix and SqSpace for me does not hold: The numbers for "None" still decreases and much more strongly than the two mentioned above.
He conveniently forgets the "None" partition, making is entire argument/criticism (for me) somewhat thin. He could in the same way argue, that Wix and Squarespace are more successful in getting non-CMS websites to switch.
I agree. Given the rounding (43.0 and 42.9 could theoretically just be a 0.01 difference) & measuring bias there might be no declining effect here at all.
A .4% loss in share since February, according to one website? Isn't that a little small and short-term to draw such a firm conclusion? or am I missing something significant?
Especially when, according to that same survey, it's up 1.7% since this time last year...
Readit News
The consumer/blog space of geocities, tripod and the like went to social media. Then we went through a period of "businesses putting up 10 pages for a fixed price" through first of all "a local web guy" then by themselves using Wix/WP/SS etc.
I've just had a bathroom fitted by a guy who functions purely on Instagram for his portfolio and Whatsapp for communication. As I'm old and curmudgeonly I wanted an email address, and when I got it, it's the one that came free with his phone.
Even local restaurants seem to be changing - using aggregators as their primary touch-point. Can't really blame them. They can easily submit their static stuff - opening times, location and menu - and the complex stuff like a booking system, taking deposits, sending calendar reminders is just handled by a single entity who's good at this stuff.
WP seems to occupy this weird middle-ground I don't see as being attractive to anyone. As a light user there are dedicated CMS for your industry - for the hardcore, you hand-build it. WP, paying for packages, and being on the hook when they don't play nice - Who-tf is the target market?
I was initially shocked by how few of them had personal websites, but they're able to get by with the tools that the platform provides them. They didn't see much ROI in maintaining a personal site, and were more concerned with diversifying their audience across platforms.
Even where you might once have thought "I'll add my own site, for the true fans, and take in orders of magnitude more money" - Now you can just add patreon (or an onlyfans) that handles that for you far more efficiently.
Then there are more niche providers like Floatplane (the Linus Tech Tips side-hustle/life-boat), who'll give you more autonomy and a CDN.
LinkTree was when the penny really dropped for me. Pretty much just an API landing page to point you to the other platforms.
Maybe the only next step left, is stuff like https://nametag.org/ - using an NFT to be your presence.
It's all very odd, and as I said above, makes me feel very old.
I don't think I'm alone in this regard.
Shame since I often want to view their menu, and IG is really aggressive about not showing you profiles & images unless you login. Viewing their menu on a 3rd party site (Google Maps, Yelp, delivery services, etc) is subpar and often out of date.
And work in anything international and this is essentially it. Want to find a smoothie shop in a beach town in Mexico? Instagram/FB + WhatsApp...thats it.
Fewer people are opening web pages on their phones. I was wondering why someone would pay so much for a website, and then realized accessing twitter through a web browser on a laptop is not the way. We won't talk about relinquishment of rights, privacy and freedom. I am a curmudgeon doing it all wrong. The way into the walled garden is through the ease of use of popular Apps on the most popular platform: the phone.
But other newer crop of CMSes - Craft, Ghost, Kirby, Twill, October, Grav... they don't have the legacy baggage and are just so much better for fully custom made sites. You basically get light web framework with super customisable admin.
On the other hand for the "quick marketing site builder" - WP is getting eaten by Webflow and also Wix and their new new builder.
Last nail to the coffin is that WP has become big target of hackers and its just hustle to keep it going compared to most other self hosted solutions.
I don't think its websites going away so much as it's WP loosing to alternatives.
I'd also add that the rise of cloud computing hasn't helped either. WP was great when hosting consisted of shared LAMP services or hosting your own. But WP is a huge pain in the arse to host on services like AWS (as well as expensive too). So lots of companies that might have opted for a CMS solution like WP could easily be swayed to another alternative. While this wouldn't be the biggest contributing factor -- it's a drop in the ocean compared to the points you've raised -- it is yet another example of how the industry is moving on from WP style content.
Unfortunately, websites cannot compete with aggregators. It's not about tech, it is about people.
Aggregators have the only thing a business need to thrive: people. If you have a "private website", you need to drive people to it, but if you have an account on a platform, people are already there.
This is why more and more businesses rely on aggregator instead of having a "private website".
It’s pretty revealing when a local bar cover band or a Chinese restaurant has its own website. It’s almost always decrepit in maintenance and low traffic (as if it could handle more).
Wordpress, Blogspot, and all these other template engine/blog platform things were the Web 2.0 answer, but I don’t think those types of services are going away. It’s a skill to implement a modern site not many people want to learn or hire when these platforms exist. Plenty of domain sites are powered by them. I just think this post is a telltale sign Wordpress is in a saturated market.
The fact that Wix and Squarespace have been advertising hard for a time, is a sign that they see the market approaching saturation, or shrinking, or both, and they are fighting the market (trying to drum up more interest) and each other (to get the bigger share of what is left).
> WP, … Who-tf is the target market?
People who don't like (or have available) an industry specific preferred solution nor the time to DIY, who have not yet hit the point of realising that growing with WP can be as time consuming as DIY.
My favourite restaurant has a website.
It's broken because "php couldn't find the necessary mysql extension to use Wordpress".
Some of these will be built on Wordpress, others custom, but once you notice one for an industry you’ll see it everywhere.
An example of such CMS for dedicated industries would be Adobe Experience Manager [1], previously known as Adobe CQ5.
Dead Comment
I can update all plugins this morning and they all want updates by the end of the day.
And then when they break it’s a disaster.
WordPress itself needs to take a chill pill too.
Leave a version out for a year or more, and only small security patches. In the last year, I think we’ve seen block widgets, JQuery migrate nightmares, that new blocks theme thing, and more. I just want them to back off already.
It’s a nightmare keeping hundreds of clients up to date.
The WordPress codebase is a disaster, and the problem is self-compounding. The founders / core have found success writing disastrous code, and as such have no impetus to be aware of the benefits of higher quality - this is largely because (as you point out) the model of development shifts the burden to small individual website makers deploying (& maintaining / firefighting) WordPress.
Since it's open-source, a disastrous codebase could be "fixed" over time if experienced engineers were willing to join and contribute to the project over time, but the culture of QA-ignorance among existing core contributors has a tendency to exasperate experienced engineers.
I'm not saying it's a "toxic" culture per se - it's very open, and especially welcoming of new / inexperienced / beginner contributors, which is certainly cool for learning. But once contributors gain a little knowledge they go one of either two ways: knowledge-stagnation (enough to contribute but not to improve), or exasperation (enough to know how to improve but lacking motivation to make that uphill battle).
The culture from core extends to the plugins, not only because there's overlap in devs, but also because the APIs the plugin community have to use are garbage. This means many of the popular plugins - while they may have high-quality UX and design - have very poor code behind that.
All the above means that WordPress needs constant small fixes contributed by an army of devs to prevent it falling over / getting hacked, which massively increases the update frequency: there's nothing preventative within it's architecture, it's all reactive patches. It also means it'll only be a viable platform as long as its extremely popular: once popularity decreases a little, the maintenance burden will be far too high for the smaller community to sustain, and existing installs are going to be even more vulnerable than ever.
There are so many JavaScript first systems in use today that are practically impossible to debug / modify without complete intimate knowledge of the codebase.
But it's free and I only pay for hosting. Anyone knows what are the alternatives for someone like me?
* you can keep everything in version control to roll things back
* content can be fed to it programmatically
* project members can send pull request to post content, rather than requiring a special account
I've only gone through some examples from a book so far, but it looks pretty powerful, and is has good recommendations from others in the community.
I don't (yet) have a personal web presence, but if I do, it will definitely be something like Hugo.
Hugo is great… once you work out how it works.
IMO, I think Automattic introduced Gutenberg way too soon to Core and introduced it as very half baked. Still to this day it's very half baked to an incredible degree, some pages will just break outright and resort to JSON errors, not to mention the built in blocks are awful and 3rd party blocks often break. That probably turned off a lot of people. It's still easier to just buy a theme that has a built in page builder and you'll get similar Lighthouse scores to Gutenburg (this being for average users, not custom themers, etc).
If you have to pay a little more to have someone fiddle with squarespace for twice as long as they would wordpress, that's ok because its now set and forget.
Also agree with GP that gutenberg has been ruining WP since it was shoved into core, for many reasons.
If the classic-press fork of WP is still a thing it'd be better for most people.
Glad to see they are working with a performance team now.
Currently I find it best use one of the wordpress-to-static plugins to have a design spit out into static html and use that. (which then you can zip/archive and delete all the php / gutenberg / logins etc) It's safer and faster.
of course you would lose comments and easy client updates going static, and may need a contact form chunk of code to add after the fact in some cases - but it's my current suggestion.
I don't understand your certs expiring, etc comment. That is because of your host if anything, and even the worst host now offer with Cloudflare or Let's Encrypt.
I've never heard of Wordpress eating up disk space due to a log file, sounds fairly made up tbh. I've had a log file eat up disk space from a poorly built custom CMS though, because it presented so many errors in the Apache logs. Hosts now maintain and update the Linux/Windows distros fairly regularly, and even when I ran dev/web ops you could automate this type of thing easily.
Among the things they've done recently:
- a major web site redesign (custom styling and look)
- added translations (via a plugin)
- updated how we gather analytics
- added a hubspot integration
I don't know many platforms where that can happen without technical people getting involved. All the next best options are SAAS platforms like shopify, squarespace, hubspot, etc.
None of us have any php skills (well, I deny having them and tend to not touch it). It's not perfect. But it's there and it works. For me the main value is that it can do what it does without me needing to be involved. We spend a few days setting it up at some point and making sure it gets updates. That's it.
It's not surprising wordpress market share is declining. I'd actually recommend new companies to pick one of the SAAS options. Even with wordpress, getting somebody else to host it for you is probably wise (there are a few good companies in this space).
Across our fleet, disabling hacked instances is a routine event. There is often a marketing person that wants to argue - according to their industry, WordPress is leading the security space. It's incredible how different industries view the product.
It's not the marketing industry. It's just that some people have this tendency of conflating popularity with supreme quality. "It can't be bad if it's popular".
Specialists in the marketing industry knows very well that outdated Wordpress is a minefield.
You want a blogging platform? Wordpress is one of the best, hands down. You want a basic CMS that is so dead simple that anyone that can use a word processor can update the website? Wordpress excels at this, because that is what it was designed to do.
But I do think it is a poor solution in a lot of cases where it has been shoehorned into. People keep grafting so much extra, unnecessary crap onto what is still, at it's core, a blogging platform. Often this is done by low-skill, low-paid "consultants" with very little experience in writing maintainable, secure code. Literally all they know how to do is write Wordpress code. I would often end up having to clean up the mess from these folks, who often still write PHP like it's 2007 and they haven't learned better [0].
Wordpress's architecture has, until relatively recently, encouraged this behavior. Their stubborn refusal to move beyond PHP 5 for many years (and continuing to support absolutely ancient versions of PHP 5 at that!) held their entire ecosystem back from writing better, more secure code for a long, long time. And, more broadly, held PHP as a whole back, as they were among its largest players. It was really hard to make the case for hosts to upgrade PHP when Wordpress still supported whatever ancient version of PHP the host was providing. Their internal architecture can be very messy in places and documentation often contradictory about what the "correct" or even preferred way to do something is because there are multiple ways implemented at different times.
I will give them credit: Wordpress itself doesn't have too many gaping security holes anymore. Most of those has been patched. It's the plugins and themes that provide the attack surface now.
The public plugins themselves (and to a lesser extent the themes) are of such widely variable quality that it is difficult to know what to use and trust. You're probably okay with the "official" plugins and most of the widely-installed third party plugins, but you get too far off the beaten path, you find a lot of garbage (and, to be fair, a few gems as well). And any custom plugin I find is immediately suspect for the reasons above. Building a theme? Which of these multiple ways of user customization do you support? All of them? None of them? Or do you just write your own customization further messing up the UX for writers and editors who have little idea how to manage Wordpress beyond the very basics of writing a post.
Oftentimes when I would come into a Wordpress case, there's 30 or so plugins installed, half of which are disabled and you have no idea what is causing the client's problem. It takes a few hours just to untangle the mess, and you can't ask the last "consultant" because they wrote garbage code, threw it over the wall and disappeared. It's the reason I usually don't take Wordpress cases anymore unless it's someone I know or an installation I did, myself, from scratch that hasn't been messed with by anyone else.
Wordpress is a great blogging platform and basic CMS. It's when people start trying to make it do things beyond this that problems start to accrue. I don't hate Wordpress. I hate what people try to do with it.
When Wordpress is your hammer, everything looks like a custom post type.
[0] https://phptherightway.com/
Ugh, that just serves to remind me of the unholy, demented shapes I've seen (Fortune 500) companies are able to mangle SharePoint into. Customizability is usually a nice quality in general, but certainly not without any cost.
Let me be a SOB for a second and ask for your opinion. I'm interested in freelancing with WordPress, mostly small company websites, would you still recommend it for someone who's just getting in the market?
TIA
Also: Is he taking new contracts? =]
It's legit AWFUL. It's a reasonable blog engine, sure, but it's been forced into being a general CMS, and it was never built for that. Our corp site is on it, and I fucking HATE it (fortunately I rarely have to deal with it).
My personal blog (21 years old and counting) has been through a bunch of platforms (Blogger, Greymatter, Blosxom) before settling on Wordpress. As I said, as a blogging tool, it's mostly fine. I don't really HATE it there, but it's still too fiddly for my tastes.
Sometimes the answer is “oh god we can’t do that”… and that seemed to be ok if we had some alternatives
Community's reaction via comments' section [1] for Gutenberg plugin was a clear indication that people will eventually go away, had they not revoke their decision.
They haven't which led to the fork [2] of WordPress thus dividing the community, at least for a while.
Had they listened to their community to acquire Elementor and make it part of WP core, things would have been a lot better today than they currently are I'm afraid.
They have wasted countless resources and valuable time that could be poured in improving Elementor and WordPress in general.
I have tried to find tutorials, articles, and books about using FSE and couldn't find anything updated.
It's just sad to be honest with you...
Currently I'm learning Laravel, because I have dealt with a lot of WordPress custom development and had lots of headaches, especially with multilanguage support.
I find it incredible it does not support such a standard feature and you are forced to buy a plugin that is actually a CMS written as a plugin...we are talking about an Inception type of thing, if you think about it with the whole CMS inside a CMS!
Madness, complete madness!
After having used it for years I can say it's an excellent product. Easy to setup, easy to learn (any Django dev can pick it up almost instantly), secure, has LTS versions. It's just an excellent CMS. It's the first product I reach for now when needing a CMS system.
I am not affiliated with Django CMS in any way, I just really love their product.
For the developer, WordPress used to be really easy to make add-ons for and customize. Now you need to know React to get the most of of WordPress, and if you're going to go through the trouble to get good with React, what are you going to do, use it to maintain WordPress sites or go get paid more to do React development?
Gutenberg and the changes associated with it do make a better site — but people didn't want a better site, they wanted a better WordPress.
I have tried to learn how to use it and have lost counting how many times they changed how it works as a whole.
You have no idea how excruciatingly painful is for me to use it that I have 22 years of professional experience with computers; imagine how non-tech savvy users feel when they try to use it!
Not all people are computer literate or are interested in technology in general, what they don't understand?!
Users want a tool to do their job and they want it to be stable, safe, and robust; don't change this concept or you will lose them on the spot, PERIOD!
Instead of letting Gutenberg as a plugin it originally were (well, technically it still is offered as a plugin, but that's another story) - so people can choose whether to use it or not - they forced it to the community and on top of that they are working non-stop on implementing new mechanisms or ideas that cancel previous features, thus leading to a mad chaos.
are you f**king kidding me? I've started to use pelican. It creates a flat file-based website with all I need. (See: https://blog.getpelican.com/)
Last time I did any work around WP this drove me insane. I remember trying to setup backup or something else simple and I was loosing my mind because there wasn't a single guide that just told you how to do it, they all beat around the bush and eventually the post just turns into a sales copy for their plugin/service/other overpriced bullshit.
Coming from the JS ecosystem, you realize just how different the culture is. Sure there are professional services in the JS ecosystem that cost money, but there's plenty of folks that are just trying to pay it forward and be helpful to the community, even the companies are good stewards. With Wordpress no, everyone is just out to make a quick buck selling you on something.
I recently engaged in a spirited discussion about this issue ( https://wptavern.com/wordpress-product-launches-roundup-appe... )
And it was uncovered that not only are people who are in close to the main development focused on releasing premium paid upgrades that require yearly fees - I contend that they are also holding back what should be basic styling options from being available in core as well.
( https://wptavern.com/wordpress-product-launches-roundup-appe... )
I mean, just wow.
We'll pay something like US$30k/year in eBay fees (including paid promotions) for a relatively small home-based operation. We're moving to a warehouse soon, so that might be another $20k/year in rent.
$30/year to solve a real problem our business has is a steal compared to this!
> If WordPress is shrinking, something else must be growing, this is, after all, a zero sum game. The very clear winners at the moment are Wix and Squarespace.
I disagree with the authors findings: When taking a look at the quaterly data https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma..., one can clearly see that WP and Shopify at least plateaued which is alright.
But the authors conclusion, that WP's loss gives points to Wix and SqSpace for me does not hold: The numbers for "None" still decreases and much more strongly than the two mentioned above.
He conveniently forgets the "None" partition, making is entire argument/criticism (for me) somewhat thin. He could in the same way argue, that Wix and Squarespace are more successful in getting non-CMS websites to switch.
Especially when, according to that same survey, it's up 1.7% since this time last year...