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I agree, but I also think that when developers talk about simplicity it's in terms of understanding the bits and moving parts that make the whole.

Like creating a nextjs app, or a wordpress website, those things are all "simple" to execute - as in easy - you type a command/click somewhere and it's done, you've got the structure and all plumbing done. You can understand all the pieces after working with them for a while and they mostly cover everything you need for their use case (which in this case makes some things simple, creating a new page, or blog entry, uploading an image, etc).

With Squarespace and such it's the same, it's simple, specially for someone who isn't a webdev - but what it's doing is not simple and when you need to stray from what it does and how it works (specially in visual builders) simple things become very complex or even not doable. They're probably still the best tools for a given range of websites/purposes, even if you know how to code, but definitively running transpilers, pre and post processors, chunking files, merging code, scoping blocks of html and css, stacks of middleware, etc, is the opposite of simple.

squarespace is especially painful for leaving the happy path.

I think a lot of the difference come from a conflation of concepts. For example, you initially talk about simplicity, but halfway through your post you start using the word "easier". In my view simple and easy are points on two different axes. In the best of worlds you get both, but as an example, a smartphone is a very complex system that is relatively easy to operate, and a unicycle is a very simple system that's relatively hard to operate.

The boundaries only break down when you need to peek and poke beyond the abstractions that make the complexity manageable. If your phone breaks down and you have to troubleshoot and fix it yourself you'd probably much rather be dealing with a unicycle from a practical point of view: there are only a handful of things that'll ever break, and you'll determine which thing broke at a glance. The potential for surprise in easy-complex systems is a good thing to keep in mind when operating a website I think.

Reminds me of Rich Hickey's talk on "simple vs easy". Wordpress is easy, but not simple if you really want to grok it.

> switching from JPG to WebP (a change with no real-world SEO value) to try to help SEO.

Nitpicking, but it _will_ have SEO value once Google rolls out Core Web Vitals this summer. Not massive, but it’s a very easy way of scoring a few perf points.

That's shaving half a hair, isn't it?

Hence the initial “nitpicking” in my post

There are other ways of getting traffic besides Google. Sure, tweak your site to please their algorithm and achieve better SEO, but always be scouting for other traffic sources.

WebP offers basically no advantage over good ol’ JPG in lossy compression of photos, which was the use case for this site.

I hear you on Core Web Vitals, but most sites will have a long list of more impactful changes to make before they could expect to see any measurable rank improvement by switching from JPG to WebP for photos.

> Using Wordpress.com

Just be careful. The free version of wp.com embeds AD-Code and tracking scripts into your page so they can make money. The paid version is without ADs however. If you want privacy, the one-click installs (like you said) on the majority of hosting providers is better.

The free version of Wordpress.com has become gnarly in recent years. They even use a dark pattern to trick you into thinking you have to buy a domain for your blog when in fact you can always just use a wordpress.com sub domain.

I think this is a good observation of the breadth of knowledge required to actually boot up a site. You're right: twiddling .htaccess while complaining about WordPress complexity seems absurd since the former is such a lower level of abstraction. I wonder if this is just due to poor documentation of wordpress, but I googled how to create personal website and there are tens of thousands of personal website explaining how to set up a personal website. I'll go one step further and criticize: this write-up is too lightly researched IMHO: if it were a research paper I'd give it a D.

Wordpress is easy... if you want it to do what it expects you to want.

Writing an article in WordPress is easy... if you have persistent Internet access. I often don't.

Or, suppose, you want to migrate to a different hosting provider. Something very easy suddenly becomes very hard.

Or you find out that something you were writing about would become illegal. Good luck taking down your wordpress and reading through the content in the browser, with no grep.

Very true. Simplicity is in the eye of the beholder.

Yeah, agreed. For me 'easier' meant making some scripts that build my personal site.

Who in their right mind would work with php?

Variables from lops can bleed through all code imports. Nightmare!

You find a bug in wordpress... Good luck ever finding it.

You got virus on wordpress. You'll never be able to get rid of it.

You want to add a form? Easy, plugin. Next week upgrade, all broken. Good look making things working again.

Actually all these problems above are solvable... But now you wasted three same time as doing it properly. And you still end up with a piece of $hit...

I think it's more about the type of things you want to waste your time: hacking wordpress or doing beautiful robust engineering.

One is pleasant, other is a nightmare. That's my view, might be different for others.

I'm just building websites with gatsby with some extra features that can reused in new websites: when I fix one website, all websites will get that fix. With wordpress it's not really easily doable.

I'm running more than 100 websites this way and more and more people and business come to me because they want 100 Google page speed and don't want to be bothered with wordpress or doing their own gatsby (even gatsby is not great out of the box).