Wordpress market share keeps growing
w3techs.com
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Which leads to another issue that it doesn't keep the formatting when I try to copy-paste. It's just such a mess and it's almost given me to give up on this project or move away from Wordpress entirely. The editor is so God-awful I don't see how anyone can use it and like it.
I despise the Gutenberg Editor, if only for reasons that it is not how people write. I don't want to interrupt my thinking by clicking to add blocks, I just want one big white sheet of virtual paper, to start writing untill the end.
There's a lot to criticize Gutenberg for, but this is not one of them. It's a big white sheet of virtual paper, and you can write your paragraphs without any clicking. Pressing enter opens a new paragraph, you can make it a heading by starting with (part of) "/heading" and pressing enter once more. It's easy to add more complicated blocks, but you don't have to.
I think Gutenberg has a chance to get good but it’s main problem is that no one is using it because no one is using it, because they are already used to plugins like WP Bakery and Elementor.
Every single non-designer person I've created a Wordpress site for has yelled loud abuses at it and told me to disable it because they "just want to write a fucking blog post, not design a new web page each time". And each time I have to install a plugin to do that. Who the hell wants to create new blocks for each sub-heading and paragraph when they're writing regular articles? The old editor is much easier to use.
> “I can’t make any promises, but I intend to develop with WordPress for the long-haul. Who knows what the future holds, but the plan is to keep Disable Gutenberg going for many years to come.”
The only official way to use the classic editor is by installing the Classic Editor plugin and WordPress will stop supporting it by the end of 2021.
You add new paragraphs by just pressing enter, and you make it a heading by typing (part of) "/heading". It's less work than in the old editor, and it even produces reasonable markup (entirely unlike the old editor). If you don't want to design a new web page, just... don't? You don't need to press every button available.
or markdown-style hashes! (+ a space after)
Then I got to understand how easy Gutenberg actually is.
You can just type and press enter. That's it. Click a block, switch it to a header. Or a paragraph. Easy.
I think one thing people don't realize is at the bottom of the editor there are breadcrumbs, and they allow you to select within the hierarchy of blocks you are working in - for things like columns for example. Before I noticed this, I hated Gutenberg, now I can just click the breadcrumb to select my block and a lot of frustration is resolved.
I know, unintuitive interfaces are bad, and this feels totally hacky, and I hope that it gets better, but knowing how to use this has made Gutenberg a joy for me to use over the old editor.
Right now I'm transcribing old Irish-language stories and giving a commentary about various features. I notice if the story gets too long, or if I get too many bullets in the list block, it starts to get super laggy. I've noticed it across both browsers. And the sad part is the "long" really isn't that long, about a page of stuff in Pages/Word.
Core Gutenberg should be super fast, we test it with Wait But Why posts. But a plugin could be adding some sort of loop that's slowing things down.
I do find Gutenberg's UX a bit clunky though. But I also recognise that it is the first step to a full WYSIWIG site editor approach that site builder plugins like Divi and Elementor have found success with.
If the editor is laggy it is because of the server / infrastructure you are using, not the editor. I can guarantee this as a fact.
I wouldn't brush off Wordpress. I've used pretty much every CMS on the market with client work and Wordpress is the one that I prefer the most for websites, hands down. For custom applications, I prefer Contentful for the backend CMS. There is a reason that Wordpress is #1 and has the market share it does. It is not flawless, but it is the best once you get to know it. Especially when you know how to optimize and debug problems.
If you are just doing a pet project and simple blog and you don't want to spend a few minutes to figure things out, then it might not be for you. There are many options for a simple blog. Like any technology worth knowing, in order to maximize its features you need to learn how it works. Best of luck to you.
You can do this if you pay for hosting or an account on wordpress.com. As this was meant to be a pet project, I really didn't want to pay for it, so went with the wordpress.com free account.
> If the editor is laggy it is because of the server / infrastructure you are using, not the editor. I can guarantee this as a fact.
I mean, you'd think that Wordpress's own editor wouldn't lag on their free account/hosting, especially if they're wanting people to upgrade and not leave?
> If you are just doing a pet project and simple blog and you don't want to spend a few minutes to figure things out, then it might not be for you.
I've spent the time trying to figure it out. The bigger issue is I don't want to pay currently, until I'm certain I'm going to stick with this project. Sadly, the only way to fix the problems is by paying.
A payment is actually not needed in order to use the Classic Editor with a Free site.
You can use the Classic block in the Block editor, which you can learn more about here - https://wordpress.com/support/wordpress-editor/blocks/classi...
There is also a possibility to edit or create any post or page in WP Admin, which will allow you to use the Classic Editor. Navigate to yoursite.WordPress.com/wp-admin and then click on Posts or Pages in the left sidebar.
Next you can hover over any post or page title and choose the "Classic Editor" link below the title. If you wish to create a new post or page within Classic Editor, then please click the down arrow next to the Add New button at the top and choose Classic Editor.
We are also happy to answer any of your questions and try to understand why the editor is laggy for you if you send us an email via help@WordPress.com. Thank you!
I would expect that once the editor loads, unless you trigger an option that requires something from the backend, it would just work. Does it actually send data back and forth during the writing process?
This is a terrible take from an ops perspective. "Just install plugins" ignores the fact that you're adding arbitrary executable code to your server, hoping whoever maintains it actually maintains it, actually secures it, and actually doesn't sell the plugin to a nefarious party at a later date.
Which is to say nothing of how many orgs allow management and marketing to choose which plugins to install. Try prying those access rights from their cold dead hands...
Gutenberg is react based client side thing. The lags while typing in Gutenberg cannot be due to the server.
This gives more context: https://wptavern.com/what-is-full-site-editing-and-what-does...
For personal projects, I now build most of the 'admin' in Angular too.
The introduction of Wordpress JSON and the REST API changed everything for me (and the small team), to allow more separation of concerns between the front and back ends.
On a more serious note though, I have personally experienced the lags on Gutenberg. And I am not sure whether the issue is with some implementation issues or due to the fact that it is a 3 mb react based blob.
I like Go, so I thought I would try hugo and I absolutely love it. It's fast, secure and can be hosted for pennies per day. I wrote a blog post about it just yesterday ;)
What a management nightmare that thing is! Especially the extensions and theme ecosystem. They makes upgrading WP basically impossible without breaking everything. And not upgrading means a potential security vulnerability waiting to be exploited.
I gave up and rewrote the entire thing with Jamstack.
It seems like there truly is a gap in the market between WordPress, Wix and vanilla everything, but sadly, I'm not sure it's a market worth pursuing, financially speaking.
Especially when we are so vocal about data lock-in on every github submissions.
GitHub Pages with Jekyll don’t even need an explicit build step.
Anyway, I forgot to add git to the list of tools needed. It's really easier once you throw git into the whole thing.
> Good luck extracting sensible data from WordPress’ database without losing metadata.
What ? You know you can do SQL queries, right ? And if you can set up the whole bang for jekyll/git you certainly can do SQL queries. And use the WP rest API. And the internal WP query API. You are more likely to lose integrity of your metadata stored in a yaml header in md files because of a typo at some points. How do you even start to lose metadata when WordPress enforces consistency and validation on every article saves ?
But forget about all that, that's software dev stuff. WP comes with built-in to sort and look at metadata and posts.
> Which one has the worst lock-in? The former certainly isn’t locked to anything.
Now you are trolling. You know full well I am refering to storing files in github. Which is owned by the good old and trusty evil MS. Not saying it's not easy to move things (you don't send your files only to gihub, right ?) but tying yourself to github is a worst lock-in than your own mysql database.
> GitHub Pages with Jekyll don’t even need an explicit build step.
That just doesn't make any sense. There are way more steps before you can even type 'git push' and then hit a browser URL https://pages.github.com/
And that's just for the setup of the whole thing. It's always gonna be faster to move around widgets and widgets content to cusomize sidebars and footers in WordPress than diving into jekyll templates.
And this is from a guy who spent the afternoon setting up strapi on a VPS and is getting into gatsby because it looks fun.
Nevertheless I believe that most software developers will find setting up and managing a static site blog pretty easy, just a matter of forking a pre-configured Jekyll / GitHub Pages repository, fiddling with it's theme, and then configuring their our custom domain and hosting options. There are plenty of tutorials on this subject.
If we were to compare self hosted WP and Jekyll then I would even argue that Jekyll is less complex, since it's just a bunch of static files behind a simple web server that doesn't require SSR or a backing MySQL database.
Jekyll writing experience may be considered worse for most, since you are required to write directly in 'md' files using markdown and sometimes even HTML elements. But again, if you're familiar with front-end development this may not be an issue to you, and I actually prefer it this way.
“We include only the top 10 million websites (top 1 million before June 2013) in the statistics in order to limit the impact of domain spammers”.
So, affiliate sites with shallow content – and probably low traffic – aren't included.
Magento 2 released and it had a better aesthetic, but it was more of the same broken ideas no one wanted to work with. Why the team went with a fresh take on the old XML-based configuration is beyond me.
Clients I worked with passed on Magento 2. Somewhere in here there is a lesson I can't articulate :-)
Shopify too had impressive growth this year.
And another thing, that I personally don't have much of a stake in, a lot of WooCommerce addon plugins are of dubious quality. Following the Wordfence blog about security issues in plugins, there are often Woo plugins that have quite some big issues, like unauthenticated SQL attack or similar. As a hacker you don't even have to go to the trouble of multi-staging several security issues to get in, 1 of these is enough.
What's amazing as well is how the companies who churn out these techno-turds have no compunction about the design flaws of their tools. Oh, everything about using these things is an anti-pattern? But we're still making money right?
People who promote static site generators do not understand why Wordpress is popular. Wordpress is like the anti-static-site-generator. People who use it don't care about automation or robustness or simplicity. They just don't want to deal with any technical bullshit. Just let me point and click on things.
It may be a giant mess under the hood, but my experience is one of automation, robustness, and simplicity. It just keeps on trucking along with no more thought on my part than “oh it wants to update, okay let’s hit that update button on the core and plugins” every so often.
The sites stay around for a year on cheap domains and re-appear in a new suit the year after.
This will continue as long as search engines continue to favor Wordpress.
> For the surveys, we count the top 10 million websites according to Alexa and Tranco, see our technology overview for more explanations. We do crawl more sites, but we use the top 10 million to select a representative sample of established sites. We found that including more sites in the sample (e.g. all the sites we know) may easily lead to a bias towards technologies typically used for "throw-away" sites or parked sites or other types of spam domains.
I've even seen agencies use these tools regularly, which makes it possible to spew out several sites per day.
If the sites where of specific categories where user-interaction is required (login required), it would give a hugely different image.
Which is different from "raw HTML". After all, everything the browser parses in the end is raw HTML, but this graph is about CMSs in particular.
Not easy to install compared to php, that's for sure. This may be a blocker.
You will find thousands of companies that do only WordPress projects, deployments, customization, and support. Ghost has none of it.
The first paid freelance website 'CMS' I built for a company back in the early-mid 90s was based on a heavily modified version of 'WWW-Board' from Matt's Script Archive.
Those were the days :)
Also, this looks like a bleak picture for the JAMStack if Wordpress keeps growing no?
That said, newer CMS's have their work cut out for them.
Sure, but no-one but very technical minded people would pick those instead of just WP. It's just extra complexity which you don't need when you start a blog or a shop or something like that. I would have a hard time defending it unless in very specific situations; wp is just too stable, too many plugins, too many programmers can support it, designers can make templates for it with ease etc, all hosters support it for next to nothing etc and without setup.
The JAMStack has a usability problem. That's why wordpress keeps growing. What do i need for wordpress? some cheap(maybe even free) webspace and a database. updates to the wordpress core are quite simple doable via webinterface. done. with this even the biggest simpleton can write blogposts.
with a jam stack? headless cmses, blogposts written in markdown, config in "frontmatter", building and deploying your blog, versioning via git, not even a litte autocomplete. even i recommend wordpress because i have not the time and nerves to teach non-it people to use the JAMStack.
I got rid of it on my own website some time ago but the startup I'm with still uses it. It's great; doesn't need my attention and our marketing people can deal with content. I'll likely transition it over to a managed solution at some point but beyond that I don't have the bandwidth to building and maintaining a new company website.
Every single WP, Drupal and Joomla website that I know that was not properly maintained or hosted with a major provider (such as WP@WP themselves) got hacked at some point.
Right - but I really do want comments. This site and many many others have write access and manage. If a self-hosted solution ever caused me issues on account of spam etc, I'd review the situation.
One solution under active discussion is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268
What many inexperienced clients expect from technology is a miracle, a magic pill, and if they get an experience that is "easier" and "intuitive", they will ignore all other issues. It got uneasy quick enough for them.
I always found it hilarious, when I still had a consulting gig, when clients would cancel their yearly service and upkeep subscription because "we can do everything with plug-ins, and my kid/ friend/ junior assistant can do Wordpress" only to come back with a last-minute "save us" fix request because their install was hacked due to disabled automatic updates, crappy plug-ins (the new "wordpress expert" could not review plug-in quality).
And whatever they do, they always start changing the theme and colors when they take over. Because everyone is an expert on what they can see. Oh boy, does choice of font and headings formatting matter! Why waste budget on back-ups, static world-facing pages, hardening the admin, let alone implementing testing and statistics to identify customer needs and interest, etc.
People are fascinating - today, most of them have lost data when a phone or computer crashed. They know about back-ups from past painful experience. But if you look at statistics for themes vs back-up implementations and downloads, It's the presentation that matters most. They can't tell you why. It hurts them to articulate why!
If you look at logs for any world-facing website, you will see multiple scans for Wordpress vulnerabilities. If you review WP security history, it includes astounding penetration of core architecture. They decide Emojis are a core system feature? Not preventing user enumeration or XSS? Emojis get hacked. Tweaking theme colors is ever so important? Core Wordpress color tweaking gets hacked. JSON REST API is important turned on out of the box for some reasion? That gets hacked. Long history of bad decisions that should have not been enabled by default.
Wordpress right is not easy. But it gives the inexperienced customers more of what they think they want, out of the box, than any other CMS system. There's a lesson there.
For me as a consultant, it was: either outsource a large part of my business to someone very cheap and work as a reseller if I want to stay in Wordpress, or raise my customer quality.
It is unfair to blame the customer, we are not any closer to core scientific principles in computer education than when we started. Information science should be core of the school curriculum, and we should have the same open scientific standards in our digital literacy courses that we have in physics or biology. It would be great if people could understand the difference between information and presentation, for starters.
It was impossible to point out to my customers that Craigslist was successful without any styling because they were delivering value to their customers. Most thought a good website "looked good, you know, like Apple".
Clients that consider their websites to be a cost centre or a checklist item for their marketing strategy are the types that say things like 'our intern can handle this going forward'.
Clients that have their website as a source of their income (say an ecommerce store or online course website built using WooCommerce or one of the LMS plugins) recognize its value and would respect the advice of the person hired to manage it.
With my current base, I concentrate on decision makers being engineers, they usually look at the spec breakdown and don't need to "understand" why support, maintenance and security are on there. Product is not WP :)
Here is why it happened:
1) (~2014) Company A is a Fortune 500 company with a large presence in my country. We designed some concepts for their product websites, which they really liked. When it came to implementation, they gave us a list of acceptable CMS technology. They'd be deploying to some kind of Plesk infrastructure and they were only allowed to use a handful of the frameworks supported by Plesk.
Of the ones included, WordPress was probably one of the better choices. I tried to convince them to let us go with something simple instead of a full-fledged WordPress installation. They said their internal security policy prevented them from allowing this, and that their team was only familiar with doing pentesting, audits, etc. for known entities like WordPress.
So we built the website and handed it over to their security team. We got paid and they deployed the website and I forgot all about it. Funnily enough, their server was breached a few years later. When they were doing an investigation they contacted me, and I shared the emails about pentesting, audits, security, etc. They were a little embarassed. Nonetheless, they're still frequent customers. Unfortunately they still insist on WordPress. We built maybe 6 product websites for them.
2) (~2015) Company B is a small brick and mortar business. Their developer built them a WordPress website but disappeared on them. I ended up deleting a large amount of bloat and plugins and writing them via simpler controller actions via a theme building framework.
3) (~2019) Company C is a ~$5bn private company with a global presence. Similar situation as Company A. The internal team insisted on either Wix or WordPress. The Ops/Marketing guys say nobody understands technology so they have to do what the IT folks say.
I've also spoken to at least 100 potential customers who all had the same story (similar to #2). They were non-technical people who wanted to build a website for their product/service. Their budget wasn't great. They gave all their money to a freelance developer. Developer wasn't really a developer - he just knew how to install a specific combination of WordPress plugins and set them up to get the outcome that they wanted. They wanted to customize it beyond what the plugin allowed, the developer said it wasn't possible and started asking for their money. Relationship soured and they parted ways. In all of those cases they spoke to me and ended up going to market with what they have. Maybe 1 or 2 of them ended up with a successful product/service and came back someday for a rebuild.
WordPress is absolutely terrible but sadly it is not going anywhere.
This is so widespread and horrible. The owner usually doesn't know anyone that can help walk through everything OR don't want to listen.
I've inherited a bunch of sites like this and it usually just ends up on having to rebuild everything and migrating content.
I make 5 figure monthly recurring revenue from shopify partnerships.
"When interpreting our surveys, you should know the following:
We investigate technologies of websites, not of individual web pages. If we find a technology on any of the pages, it is considered to be used by the website. We include only the top 10 million websites (top 1 million before June 2013) in the statistics in order to limit the impact of domain spammers. We include all sites that are either in the Alexa top 10 million or in the Tranco top 1 million list. Website popularity rankings are sometimes considered inaccurate for measuring website traffic, but we find that they serve our purpose of providing a representative sample of established sites very well. We exclude sites that have no useful content, e.g. sites that only show the default web server page. We do not consider subdomains to be separate websites. For instance, sub1.example.com and sub2.example.com are considered to belong to the same site as example.com. That means for example, that all the subdomains of blogger.com, wordpress.com and similar sites are counted only as one website. We do not include redirected domains. For example, Sun.com redirects to Oracle.com, and is therefore not counted. Because our definition of "website" differs a bit from Alexa's and Tranco's definition, the "top 10 million" websites are actually not exactly 10 million. However, this has no statistical significance. Our reports are updated daily. Please be aware of the limitations indicated in our disclaimer."