And you know what I have learned by talking to these businesses? It's that WordPress is still not easy enough to use for non techy people.
Nobody wants to touch their website, out of fear of doing something wrong. So they have to go pay someone to do it every time.
I'm running pinkpigeon.co.uk, which tries to actually make websites easy enough to use for everyone. But I am actually running into a problem where people expect all websites to be like WordPress and the first thing you hear is "oh I don't want to learn another thing". It's only when I show them the system, that they go "oh wow, that really is a lot easier". The problem is trying to convince anyone of this remotely via the Internet. Much easier to do in person.
I have the utmost respect for WordPress and used it much myself, but at the moment it's challenging to have to be compared against it when simpler solutions exist.
Not sure if suitable WYIWYG editors are still around, or if Word exports to HTML have become usable.
I doubt there is beauty to be found.
And websites are a lot about beauty.
Nope
How often does a construction/handyman "online flyer" webpage need a change? Once a year, maybe. The primary point I am trying to make is that websites of a lot of small business (obviously ones that are not webshops) serve more or less static content and therefore have no need for a backend at all.
You have a food blog where you publish recipes/reviews daily? Surely a blogging platform is a much better fit for you. You have a restaurant page where you publish contacts, coordinates and a menu which changes every second year? Well, maybe a static site generator is a better fit.
Those are just some examples that with Wordpress, it's a click and pretty much plug and play. With the static site generator you're proposing, you quickly need to do coding yourself.
Why do you need a backend for GA or image gallery?
If that is a photo-sharing website, then yes, proper backend is needed. But for a portfolio website of a photographer, which gets updated once a month at best, static manifest will work wonders.
The frontend code which eventually renders the image gallery does not care whether fetched image list is produced by PHP code or is served by http server directly from filesystem.
I can't tell if u missed a /s or genuinely think that isn't additional dev.
My business requires a what now?
“Say what now? Where do I login to update a photo on the site?”
In short everything has to be continuous, otherwise you'll stall and die. Now go buy some CI/CD from the shop.
[1] wikipedia
What most people want is to have something that works, where they can focus on their content and not on your tools. Wordpress works for people.
If they get a CI/CD pipeline maintained by someone, how do they create pages, get updates, fix those pesky security issues, write a blog post on their mac that when saved automatically gets posted? How easy is it to apply a theme to your CI/CD pipeline? Your tools work for you, but are you going to maintain them with the same level of features as Wordpress?
Oops, it's holiday time, will you write a greeting card plugin for your CI/CD pipeline for them to purchase cards on their website and send site-specific cards to their email list by Monday? No? Sorry, they just switched off of your CI/CD pipeline to Wordpress.
When moving to a different hosting provider, people want to conduct business not learn a to use a new CI/CD pipeline to match the tools at the new hosting company.
What about when you get tired of updating their site generator code for them? They will need to start over, and they won't pick another CI/CD tool that's unmaintained and is expected to get horribly outdated after a year.
People go into business in order to conduct business.
Wordpress has 1 click install for all those things as plugins (or work out-of-the-box)
Static site generators are bad for dynamic websites, but that does not mean you have to try and fit a whole dynamic platform into a static website. Different use cases, different tools.
And, that's false. Unless you make them run one of your restricted platforms that doesn't have the features they want and need for their business.
Wordpress runs 60% of CMS websites. 15% of the most viewed websites run Wordpress.
> You only need to worry about security issues if you build such a site on top of a dynamic platform.
Do you actually believe that there are no security issues with static websites?
Thank you for the conversation, but I'm going back to running my business.
i think it's a mistake to believe that this is a problem to be solved, or that the reason people don't want to touch their website is just a "fear of doing something wrong". it's not a question of how easy the admin panel is to use - the vast network of people willing to handle wordpress sites is a feature of wordpress. a business owner doesn't want to deal with their website, they want to pay somebody else to do it for them. tech people like self-serve solutions that they can log in and administer themselves, but there's a whole lot of people who really don't want that - they want to just call somebody up, explain what they want, and have it taken care of. the reason wordpress runs 40% of the internet is because it delivers that experience.
Why would a software engineer hate Craigslist? It's one of the most streamlined, responsive web sites I interact with on a regular basis. No third party scripts. It's built to purpose and it works very well without any fuss.
I suppose I have some minor gripes - with noscript it looks awful and they killed off their RSS feeds a while back. But hardly enough to inspire hate!
Technically he subtly shifted from supporting free software to open source. Just pointing that out, not making a big deal about terminology or anything as WP is still GPL'ed.
edit: For Wordpress only install reputable, necessary plugins. Turn on auto-update. Keep backups. Things should be just fine. Now you aren't locked into a single platform and you can extend your website as much as needed (unlike Squarespace/Wix which severely limit what you can do).
Having been paid quite well to migrate to and from WordPress, and to help maintain the WP sites of major publishers, I have to say that this is questionable advice. In most cases in my experience, the publisher has employed third-party providers (at huge cost) to develop frameworks and custom plugins that can easily be broken by automatic updates.
Updates need evaluation and testing in staging sites before they can be rolled out. For publishers, the first install of WP is free - everything after that costs plenty.
'Make sure you keep everything updated!' has a ton of caveats and pitfalls, that's just the reality.
Btw, I'm a senior full stack software engineer. But for my digital media business I operate several Wordpress websites. I don't talk to any Wordpress devs and do any custom Wordpress theme or plugin development (aside from what is available in the GUI and extremely minor CSS tweaks).
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/05/using-fake-reviews-to-fi...
Wix and alikes are proprietary software, that lock in users on their services, have limited customization options, don't allow you to edit code and have little to no export options.
Whoever pays someone else to have it's website built on wix or alikes is getting a very bad deal, due to the above mentioned restrictions (compared to WP) they'll end up very dissatisfied in few years if things go well (meaning more traffic and more needs).
Source: experience. As a developer I feel the frustration coding for WP, but at the same time it's the best compromise to provide a CMS that the average user can manage
Step 2 is difficult to even define properly. What is a plugin supposed to be able to do, and what is a plugin supposed to not be able to do? If you can answer that question precisely, then you can solve the problem, but if you can answer that question precisely then you probably don't need plugins in the first place.
If you are building a simple brochure website, none of this matters.
i set up my first real blog over a decade ago. i picked wordpress, because that seems to be the default, and i didn't know any better. oh my god, i hated maintaining that thing so, so much. it pretty much killed my desire to blog, as a matter of fact.
i recently started another blog, and this time i used a static site generator. i wouldn't recommend such a thing for non-technical people, but if you are willing to get your hands a little bit dirty, it is a hell of a lot easier to fix than wordpress ever was.
Plus: what headaches? Do it well, keep it updated ( uh, yeh, like literally ALL the software, ever ) and it’ll work flawlessly for years.