Comment by creshal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by creshal | Hacker News Reader

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> Your average business owner wants to focus on the important thing: their content. They want to type in a box and push publish. End. They don’t care about how crap (or not) the code is. They don’t care about performance too much. They do want to have the extensibility that is offered. They don’t want to get locked in (cough, Wix, Squarespace).

That's IMO just a wrong understanding of the average business owner. Wordpress is much more useful to web agencies with the necessary skill set to heavily customise it than to the average Joe SMB Owner.

To them, Wordpress is just as much a black box as Wix or Squarespace is, and all the web agencies using Wordpress to make websites for that demographic modify it so much with so many mutually exclusive plugin pipelines that getting their website from one to another often involves a complete rewrite anyway, if you want meaningful changes done.

And for a long time, it was just the cost of doing business. But now? Nowadays, Squarespace et al. are probably a much better fit for them. Effectively the same vendor lock in if you're not a web agency yourself, but with much less overhead involved.

I agree with both you and OP.

That’s why I’ve completely changed my position on who should be using what tech to build sites. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

I now recommend clients three options, based on the type of business:

1) If they’re a local small business (eg. Restaurant, flower shop) or solo creative business like a photographer or videographer, just do Squarespace. Wordpress is way too complex for their needs and they will easily shoot themselves in the foot.

2) If it’s a Saas company, tech startup, design agency, or enterprise, I strongly strongly recommend Webflow for their marketing site even though they think they want JAMstack. When the marketing team starts pulling dev time to redesign parts of the site every week, they immediately will regret the JAMstack decision.

3) if it’s a media/content business, always go Wordpress. Their employees will already be familiar with it, and the collaborative editing and SEO experience cannot be beat for publishing content on a daily basis. Combine this with plugins for newsletters and social integrations and the extra hassle of Wordpress is worth it for them.

We've recently switched out of Wordpress to Webflow and hit upon 3 snags that soured my opinion of it, though now we're "done" on it these are less of a big deal but I'd still probably have just stuck with WP with a reimagined and cleaned up theme/ACF for custom data:

* Only one person can edit code at a time - this caused us to have to split who was doing what and we even ended up losing work when someone overwrote someone elses changes https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-39 (this goes back to 2017)

* Tracking changes in VCS easily (https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-381) another from 2017, we tried out flowgater though in the end have just settled for exporting the code as is and then just committing it by hand.

* A max limit of 10k characters (edit - as pointed out in comment, that's per file, I think IIRC we had all our JS in one single place which is how we hit this our side) in site code (https://forum.webflow.com/t/embed-html-10-000-characters/443...) - this caught us on doing some embedding, we worked around it in the end and not a massive deal but still felt a little annoying having to work around it.

Webflow is definitely in need of more features (with their last funding round I bet you’ll see them soon). But even with those hiccups, you can just move so much faster inside Webflow to update or completely redesign a site than with Wordpress.

For example, I work with a Saas company that has their designer throw together landing pages for competitor comparisons and integrations in like a day, and they change them weekly based on testing.

You just can’t do that on Wordpress at that speed without making a mess with heavy plugins and bloat.

You can do that with wordpress plus a site builder.

There are sure builders that are as good as Webflow, but without losing WP power

> A max limit of 10k characters in site code

A brief investigation says it's 10K characters per file, but still how the hell does a web site enforce that? Sure seems arbitrary and silly.

> "There is no one-size-fits-all solution."

Absolutely. Unfortunately, tools create confirmation bias, and given WP's market share those voices are collectively the loudest.

The point being, the general perception is WP is *always* the solution for *every* need. And Automattic and other leaders with the WP "community" don't make much of an effort to change that.

I like WP. I use WP. ButI find the one size fits all attitude very annoying and ethically suspect.

At one point, we used Wordpress for everything from websites for small restaurants to collaborative desktop publishing platforms, but none of this turned out a great idea longterm.

We still use wordpress occasionally, but no longer for those customers.

>1) If they’re a local small business (eg. Restaurant, flower shop) or solo creative business like a photographer or videographer, just do Squarespace. Wordpress is way too complex for their needs and they will easily shoot themselves in the foot.

This (with a slight modification).

I built websites back in the Web 1.0 days. I know how to use HTML, CSS and a bit of javascript. When I needed to build a "brochure" site for my professional services business, I could have done it from scratch, I could have waded into the convoluted and plug-in dependent mess that is WP, or I could go to a simple tool like Squarespace or Wix. I am capable of learning anything I needed, but the real question is: when I need to update a page, do I want to relearn all that stuff I forgot because it isn't my day job?

When comparing Squarespace to Wix, I realized that Squarespace doesn't have backup and restore capability. That is a mindblowingly huge hole to me. So I went with Wix. Yes, I am "locked in" to Wix. If I wanted to go to another solution, I could pay someone pennies to replicate my existing site.

Contrast to my experience with WP. I inherited a WP site with the non-profit I work with. I ended up getting them to pay godaddy to manage the site and the SSL because I don't have the time to deal with it. I dread the day when the next WP upgrade breaks the janky WSIWG plug-in (elementor I think), which already doesn't work properly on one of the pages, so I have to edit the HTML. As soon as our long contract with godaddy expires, I am paying someone to replicate the site in Wix.

Like you pointed out in #3 above, I guess there are some applicable use cases for WP, but anyone who doesn't need more than a brochure site is ill served by that choice.

> If it’s a Saas company, tech startup, design agency, or enterprise, I strongly strongly recommend Webflow for their marketing site even though they think they want JAMstack

Yeeeah but no. Companies (especially those ones) can have plenty of good reasons to need more control / custom code / integrations / etc. I think a lot of people don't realize how crippling and limiting committing to Webflow can be, and how much you end up hacking around it. Raises hand

https://www.plasmic.app gives you the same (actually, a FAR better) visual editor that plugs into whatever codebase you want. More people need to know about them.

Plasmic shows more promise as a solution for designers on product teams to take over CSS styling on the product itself (eg. your SaaS app with a react frontend). But I think they still have a long way to go on the visual editor...last time I checked their editor didn't even work on Safari.

Using Plasmic + JAMstack on a marketing site would be the worst of both worlds IMO. All the static site hassles with none of the stuff that makes static sites fun for me.

It gives design and marketing the ability to edit landing pages, but they still have to bug the engineers for bigger changes to the site structure.

The biggest advantage to Webflow is its super versatile CMS, and separate simplified editor for content teams. Our engineering team literally never has to touch anything on our main domain. Marketing/Design completely owns it. Our engineers focus entirely on our product.

Like all developer-centric tools coming out of the JAMstack ecosystem, Plasmic seems to ignore the existence of content marketing and SEO (Wordpress's writing experience and friendliness for non-devs is why they won the internet), which is the entire point of having a marketing site in the first place.

Hello! I work on Plasmic. Thanks for the feedback (and thanks mosr for the shout-out!). Webflow is a great platform, glad you're on it - we're fighting the same fight.

Just wanted to share that our main use case actually has been for marketing sites (apps are a minority) and giving content editors autonomy. We do spend a lot of time on page performance, SEO concerns, etc.

Publishing new pages and other site structure changes (and even publishing new sites) does not actually require bugging engineers. Letting marketers/designers own the site and freeing up developers is our entire focus.

We are also working on a simplified content editing mode that restricts design changes.

Appreciate your following along with our progress, and hope we can continue hearing your feedback - that's how we make the product better for you.

Agreed. I know a number of small business owners who prefer Squarespace for the ease of use and integration, and they've never thought about lock-in as a dealbreaker. I know some entrepreneurs and nonprofits who prefer WordPress for the FOSS and the ability to customize. A little while ago I set up a personal WP site for a family member and they got frustrated with having to install updates seemingly every time they logged in to the panel.

^ as a former WordPress developer, this is where I'm at. If anyone with a small budget wants a website for their small business or project, I would not suggest WordPress unless they are working with an agency they can afford who specializes in it. SquareSpace, Wix, SpaceCraft, etc are much easier to work with.

Also agree re: lock-in. This is actually improving somewhat with Gutenberg, but transferring data from a WordPress site to another platform is still usually going to be a giant pain in the butt unless your content is extremely simple - no metadata, widgets, forms, custom blocks, etc.

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