Ask HN: What made WordPress so freaking popular? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What made WordPress so freaking popular?

9 pointsbarelyusable18 comments

Wondering about this: is it because at that time there was nothing else, or was it so good?

1) Easy to install: I mean normal-human easy, not programmer-easy

2) Easy to use: I mean normal-human easy, no programmer-easy

3) Can handle thousands of visitors a day on basic hosting if configured decently

4) Updates rarely break stuff, great backwards compatibility

5) Once you understand how it works, for what stuff using it and the community/ecosystem (plugins, themes, how to develop, etc), it's really fast to go online and start your journey to success (or failure)

6) Proven success: unlike other idolized cms or frameworks, if you search for WordPress success stories you find thousands of sites, of all kind, that made millions. I won't name names, but there are many popular open source frameworks and cms that are all talk and no money. You have to show me the money if you want to be taken serious, show me people are making money with this software and they are not the creators themselves

As you can see there are some points, like 4 and 5, that are the completely opposite of what you usually hear about WordPress. The sad fact is that, despite its success, WordPress is considered "pleabian" or something like that by other programmers. It's like the PHP of cms, hated by people who don't understand that going and staying online comes before current month buzzwords or arcane computer science departments technology. I respect and I am fascinated by both buzzwords and arcane stuff, but I understand that serving the users, and achieving real world success, comes first.

This is a good list. I would add easy to customize as well - there are levels to this from changing user facing settings in the admin UI, to hiring a developer who can modify/build a plugin to solve your business need. But at all levels, customizing WordPress is typically easier for the end user than other CMS's (even enterprise grade products that cost 5 figures for a license)

> 2) Easy to use: I mean normal-human easy, no programmer-easy

Which I just don't see, few things make me feel less competent than "simple" configuration of an add-on or theme. Maybe I'm just used to overly complicated interfaces, but everytime I have to touch a wordpress install I know its going to be a few hours of frustration.

You likely didn't give WP write access to itself. That breaks all the convenience functions and means you need to faff about with uploading zip files over ftp and whatnot for the most basic of things.

No that wasn't it. No hate anyway, its a fine piece of software that gets the job done for a lot of people, just for me I felt it unintuitive.

Beautiful admin interface. Probably the best compared to any web software by far.

Over years, while other CMS have overly complicated admins, which grow more and more complex, WordPress polished what it already had.

It's honed to writers.

WYSIWYG editor is solid, the white space, font and font sizes are pretty great considering it's a browser.

I've once heard a person say they prefer writing in the WordPress interface more than they do using Word.

Easy previewing of stuff in draft mode.

Autosaving.

Revisions.

Plugin and theme community (both open source and commercial) top tier.

Weird to see this downvoted. When it came out, the Wordpress admin was beautiful and smooth---and everything else was ugly and clunky. It was like the iPhone vs feature phones. The handful of built-in themes looked great too. Whatever you think of Wordpress today, compared to its contemporary competitors it was outstanding.

It also produced very clean and valid XHTML out of the box, which was considered very important at the time; and made writing plugins trivial.

It's important to remember that the competition at the time was Movable Type (Perl, complicated to install and extend, terrible output, expensive) and Blogger/blogspot (can't self-host, can't extend, limited control, again crappy output). WP was a dream in comparison.

MovableType was the established blogging tool for self–hosted blogs. SixApart (the developers) had had a very loose licensing system, it was basically free for most users. MT had a couple of design flaws which became major problems as individual blogs grew, it build everything as static pages, did very little caching, and the default templates caused rebuilds for every comment or trackback.

While most of those design flaws could be addressed, people started using B2/cafelog which was forked into WordPress. Around this same time period, SixApart started chasing $ down and pushed through a seemingly suicidal licensing change which was poorly communicated and caused many independent bloggers to switch to WordPress.

MovableType development stalled even as WordPress shifted gears and rapidly became popular with Automattic being founded around 2004 or 2005 to commercialize Wordpress, resulting in the wordpress.com service.

MovableType is now clearly a forgotten also–ran, even as static web publishing has regained favor with jekyll and Hugo.

Part timing, part quality of the product. When it came out there just wasn't that much competition. Now there are so many more alternatives that it is likely to lose steam over the next few years - particularly in niche sectors. Not so long ago I wrote about why it is not the best solution for the real estate sector:

https://smallbusinessforum.co/why-an-alternative-to-wordpres...

I first started off with PHPFusion. I would not touch WordPress. Why? It kept crashing. Not because WordPress was crashing, but because I was installing dozens of plugins just to install them because they "looked good".

Once I learned: install the plugins you need, not every single plugin you come across. My views on WordPress changed. I also realized how easy it was to setup and use.

Not only that, but when it comes to clients, I realized how easy it was to train them with WordPress. In fact, there is so much documentation out there, I normally end up sending them a 5 minute YouTube video which shows them how to login, create posts and pages. After that, they usually go exploring WordPress on their own. Cost to me? $0 and a little time.

However, I have drifted away from using WordPress for my personal projects. There are millions of things that WordPress can do and almost nothing it cannot do, but there are things that WordPress just can't do my way.

Of most importance is the fact that it has first mover advantage in the CMS category. Then the fact that it's open source and extensible.

What? WP was certainly not the first cms/blogging tool, not even the first to reach mainstream popularity. Blogger was arguably the first offering "blogging for non-nerds", Movable Type was the first to reach critical mass among nerds, and the very first "blog engine" was probably Manila. WP wasn't even the first to have plugins, although it was probably the best implementation yet (and one of the main reasons behind its success). If you extend the search to generic CMS engines, there is also stuff like PhpNuke, Plone and the other "portal-like" tools which are even older.

One other thing i like about it (though i never use it personally) is that it is highly configurable, so much so that people use it do all sorts of things like run membership sites, optimizepress for sales letter pages, landing pages, etc. It can transform into anything with the right plugins than remain just a blogging platform.

PHP + easy install.

It is cheap to provide PHP hosting and that is why so many people could go with their own installs of Wordpress.

The real truth is probably much more complicated, but this is what I think is the most important factor.

Timing. It solved the online publishing problem at the right time. Then it snowballed into what it is today.

Openness, platform-y feel, easy to build business on top of Wordpress without reinventing wheels.

things started out on shared hosting. WordPress is easy to install on shared hosting, so it took off. It also has a nice graphical install process.

If everything was a shared VPS, that would have been a different story.

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