WordPress’ market share is shrinking
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The consumer/blog space of geocities, tripod and the like went to social media. Then we went through a period of "businesses putting up 10 pages for a fixed price" through first of all "a local web guy" then by themselves using Wix/WP/SS etc.
I've just had a bathroom fitted by a guy who functions purely on Instagram for his portfolio and Whatsapp for communication. As I'm old and curmudgeonly I wanted an email address, and when I got it, it's the one that came free with his phone.
Even local restaurants seem to be changing - using aggregators as their primary touch-point. Can't really blame them. They can easily submit their static stuff - opening times, location and menu - and the complex stuff like a booking system, taking deposits, sending calendar reminders is just handled by a single entity who's good at this stuff.
WP seems to occupy this weird middle-ground I don't see as being attractive to anyone. As a light user there are dedicated CMS for your industry - for the hardcore, you hand-build it. WP, paying for packages, and being on the hook when they don't play nice - Who-tf is the target market?
I was initially shocked by how few of them had personal websites, but they're able to get by with the tools that the platform provides them. They didn't see much ROI in maintaining a personal site, and were more concerned with diversifying their audience across platforms.
Even where you might once have thought "I'll add my own site, for the true fans, and take in orders of magnitude more money" - Now you can just add patreon (or an onlyfans) that handles that for you far more efficiently.
Then there are more niche providers like Floatplane (the Linus Tech Tips side-hustle/life-boat), who'll give you more autonomy and a CDN.
LinkTree was when the penny really dropped for me. Pretty much just an API landing page to point you to the other platforms.
Maybe the only next step left, is stuff like https://nametag.org/ - using an NFT to be your presence.
It's all very odd, and as I said above, makes me feel very old.
I don't think I'm alone in this regard.
The only ones I've seen for Youtubers are cooking channels, where the description format is very poor for recipes.
Shame since I often want to view their menu, and IG is really aggressive about not showing you profiles & images unless you login. Viewing their menu on a 3rd party site (Google Maps, Yelp, delivery services, etc) is subpar and often out of date.
Note: I also loathe Instagram menus
And work in anything international and this is essentially it. Want to find a smoothie shop in a beach town in Mexico? Instagram/FB + WhatsApp...thats it.
I'd be interested in a dual sim phone that had an instant "private mode" user account switch to the second sim. But even that would be a pita and it would severely limit the choice of hardware as well.
Initial registration would happen every time you want to do anything. (And you'd need a new phone... every time...)
Fewer people are opening web pages on their phones. I was wondering why someone would pay so much for a website, and then realized accessing twitter through a web browser on a laptop is not the way. We won't talk about relinquishment of rights, privacy and freedom. I am a curmudgeon doing it all wrong. The way into the walled garden is through the ease of use of popular Apps on the most popular platform: the phone.
But other newer crop of CMSes - Craft, Ghost, Kirby, Twill, October, Grav... they don't have the legacy baggage and are just so much better for fully custom made sites. You basically get light web framework with super customisable admin.
On the other hand for the "quick marketing site builder" - WP is getting eaten by Webflow and also Wix and their new new builder.
Last nail to the coffin is that WP has become big target of hackers and its just hustle to keep it going compared to most other self hosted solutions.
I don't think its websites going away so much as it's WP loosing to alternatives.
I'd also add that the rise of cloud computing hasn't helped either. WP was great when hosting consisted of shared LAMP services or hosting your own. But WP is a huge pain in the arse to host on services like AWS (as well as expensive too). So lots of companies that might have opted for a CMS solution like WP could easily be swayed to another alternative. While this wouldn't be the biggest contributing factor -- it's a drop in the ocean compared to the points you've raised -- it is yet another example of how the industry is moving on from WP style content.
Unfortunately, websites cannot compete with aggregators. It's not about tech, it is about people.
Aggregators have the only thing a business need to thrive: people. If you have a "private website", you need to drive people to it, but if you have an account on a platform, people are already there.
This is why more and more businesses rely on aggregator instead of having a "private website".
It’s pretty revealing when a local bar cover band or a Chinese restaurant has its own website. It’s almost always decrepit in maintenance and low traffic (as if it could handle more).
Wordpress, Blogspot, and all these other template engine/blog platform things were the Web 2.0 answer, but I don’t think those types of services are going away. It’s a skill to implement a modern site not many people want to learn or hire when these platforms exist. Plenty of domain sites are powered by them. I just think this post is a telltale sign Wordpress is in a saturated market.
Intentionally. If your users know they're manipulating files with your software and not "songs," "pictures," or "documents," they're less likely to subscribe to your cloud service that copies them between machines and more likely to find another application that can consume those files.
The fact that Wix and Squarespace have been advertising hard for a time, is a sign that they see the market approaching saturation, or shrinking, or both, and they are fighting the market (trying to drum up more interest) and each other (to get the bigger share of what is left).
> WP, … Who-tf is the target market?
People who don't like (or have available) an industry specific preferred solution nor the time to DIY, who have not yet hit the point of realising that growing with WP can be as time consuming as DIY.
My favourite restaurant has a website.
It's broken because "php couldn't find the necessary mysql extension to use Wordpress".
Some of these will be built on Wordpress, others custom, but once you notice one for an industry you’ll see it everywhere.
An example of such CMS for dedicated industries would be Adobe Experience Manager [1], previously known as Adobe CQ5.
[1] https://business.adobe.com/cy_en/products/experience-manager/headless-cms.htmlI can update all plugins this morning and they all want updates by the end of the day.
And then when they break it’s a disaster.
WordPress itself needs to take a chill pill too.
Leave a version out for a year or more, and only small security patches. In the last year, I think we’ve seen block widgets, JQuery migrate nightmares, that new blocks theme thing, and more. I just want them to back off already.
It’s a nightmare keeping hundreds of clients up to date.
The WordPress codebase is a disaster, and the problem is self-compounding. The founders / core have found success writing disastrous code, and as such have no impetus to be aware of the benefits of higher quality - this is largely because (as you point out) the model of development shifts the burden to small individual website makers deploying (& maintaining / firefighting) WordPress.
Since it's open-source, a disastrous codebase could be "fixed" over time if experienced engineers were willing to join and contribute to the project over time, but the culture of QA-ignorance among existing core contributors has a tendency to exasperate experienced engineers.
I'm not saying it's a "toxic" culture per se - it's very open, and especially welcoming of new / inexperienced / beginner contributors, which is certainly cool for learning. But once contributors gain a little knowledge they go one of either two ways: knowledge-stagnation (enough to contribute but not to improve), or exasperation (enough to know how to improve but lacking motivation to make that uphill battle).
The culture from core extends to the plugins, not only because there's overlap in devs, but also because the APIs the plugin community have to use are garbage. This means many of the popular plugins - while they may have high-quality UX and design - have very poor code behind that.
All the above means that WordPress needs constant small fixes contributed by an army of devs to prevent it falling over / getting hacked, which massively increases the update frequency: there's nothing preventative within it's architecture, it's all reactive patches. It also means it'll only be a viable platform as long as its extremely popular: once popularity decreases a little, the maintenance burden will be far too high for the smaller community to sustain, and existing installs are going to be even more vulnerable than ever.
There are so many JavaScript first systems in use today that are practically impossible to debug / modify without complete intimate knowledge of the codebase.
There's two ends to the spectrum: over-enginerring and spagetti. Basically overplanned layers of abstraction agreed by distributed committee vs unplanned mess.
A bunch of modern frameworks have gone far too far over the abstraction cliff, but as bad as it gets for people wanting to contribute to those core libraries, the APIs provided for extension and integration are mostly sane, as is error logging. Most importantly of all, they tend to be reasonably stable and secure at their core: updates are less mandatory and LTS cycles are longer for past library versions.
So while your complaints are valid, I think the pros and cons weigh heavily against WordPress. Yes, when something broke I could always dive into my WP install with a quick fix, but I never had any way of being sure it worked everywhere (automated testing is nightmarish), never knew how long my fix would last; whether it would be an editor contribution or a plug-in update that would break it, etc. etc. Side effects in WordPress are absolutely out of control.
But it's free and I only pay for hosting. Anyone knows what are the alternatives for someone like me?
* you can keep everything in version control to roll things back
* content can be fed to it programmatically
* project members can send pull request to post content, rather than requiring a special account
I've only gone through some examples from a book so far, but it looks pretty powerful, and is has good recommendations from others in the community.
I don't (yet) have a personal web presence, but if I do, it will definitely be something like Hugo.
And when I say developers oriented I mean it in a good way.
Documentation for first-time users could be better though. The YAML page structure took some time to wrap my head around. Also, as it’s flat-file, backups are trivial – just copy the folder or commit everything to a VCS.
But yes it would not be a replacement for WordPress if you want to click together a site with themes and plugins
Hugo is great… once you work out how it works.
IMO, I think Automattic introduced Gutenberg way too soon to Core and introduced it as very half baked. Still to this day it's very half baked to an incredible degree, some pages will just break outright and resort to JSON errors, not to mention the built in blocks are awful and 3rd party blocks often break. That probably turned off a lot of people. It's still easier to just buy a theme that has a built in page builder and you'll get similar Lighthouse scores to Gutenburg (this being for average users, not custom themers, etc).
If you have to pay a little more to have someone fiddle with squarespace for twice as long as they would wordpress, that's ok because its now set and forget.
Also agree with GP that gutenberg has been ruining WP since it was shoved into core, for many reasons.
If the classic-press fork of WP is still a thing it'd be better for most people.
Glad to see they are working with a performance team now.
Currently I find it best use one of the wordpress-to-static plugins to have a design spit out into static html and use that. (which then you can zip/archive and delete all the php / gutenberg / logins etc) It's safer and faster.
of course you would lose comments and easy client updates going static, and may need a contact form chunk of code to add after the fact in some cases - but it's my current suggestion.
I don't understand your certs expiring, etc comment. That is because of your host if anything, and even the worst host now offer with Cloudflare or Let's Encrypt.
I've never heard of Wordpress eating up disk space due to a log file, sounds fairly made up tbh. I've had a log file eat up disk space from a poorly built custom CMS though, because it presented so many errors in the Apache logs. Hosts now maintain and update the Linux/Windows distros fairly regularly, and even when I ran dev/web ops you could automate this type of thing easily.
Among the things they've done recently:
- a major web site redesign (custom styling and look)
- added translations (via a plugin)
- updated how we gather analytics
- added a hubspot integration
I don't know many platforms where that can happen without technical people getting involved. All the next best options are SAAS platforms like shopify, squarespace, hubspot, etc.
None of us have any php skills (well, I deny having them and tend to not touch it). It's not perfect. But it's there and it works. For me the main value is that it can do what it does without me needing to be involved. We spend a few days setting it up at some point and making sure it gets updates. That's it.
It's not surprising wordpress market share is declining. I'd actually recommend new companies to pick one of the SAAS options. Even with wordpress, getting somebody else to host it for you is probably wise (there are a few good companies in this space).
Across our fleet, disabling hacked instances is a routine event. There is often a marketing person that wants to argue - according to their industry, WordPress is leading the security space. It's incredible how different industries view the product.
It's not the marketing industry. It's just that some people have this tendency of conflating popularity with supreme quality. "It can't be bad if it's popular".
Specialists in the marketing industry knows very well that outdated Wordpress is a minefield.
You want a blogging platform? Wordpress is one of the best, hands down. You want a basic CMS that is so dead simple that anyone that can use a word processor can update the website? Wordpress excels at this, because that is what it was designed to do.
But I do think it is a poor solution in a lot of cases where it has been shoehorned into. People keep grafting so much extra, unnecessary crap onto what is still, at it's core, a blogging platform. Often this is done by low-skill, low-paid "consultants" with very little experience in writing maintainable, secure code. Literally all they know how to do is write Wordpress code. I would often end up having to clean up the mess from these folks, who often still write PHP like it's 2007 and they haven't learned better [0].
Wordpress's architecture has, until relatively recently, encouraged this behavior. Their stubborn refusal to move beyond PHP 5 for many years (and continuing to support absolutely ancient versions of PHP 5 at that!) held their entire ecosystem back from writing better, more secure code for a long, long time. And, more broadly, held PHP as a whole back, as they were among its largest players. It was really hard to make the case for hosts to upgrade PHP when Wordpress still supported whatever ancient version of PHP the host was providing. Their internal architecture can be very messy in places and documentation often contradictory about what the "correct" or even preferred way to do something is because there are multiple ways implemented at different times.
I will give them credit: Wordpress itself doesn't have too many gaping security holes anymore. Most of those has been patched. It's the plugins and themes that provide the attack surface now.
The public plugins themselves (and to a lesser extent the themes) are of such widely variable quality that it is difficult to know what to use and trust. You're probably okay with the "official" plugins and most of the widely-installed third party plugins, but you get too far off the beaten path, you find a lot of garbage (and, to be fair, a few gems as well). And any custom plugin I find is immediately suspect for the reasons above. Building a theme? Which of these multiple ways of user customization do you support? All of them? None of them? Or do you just write your own customization further messing up the UX for writers and editors who have little idea how to manage Wordpress beyond the very basics of writing a post.
Oftentimes when I would come into a Wordpress case, there's 30 or so plugins installed, half of which are disabled and you have no idea what is causing the client's problem. It takes a few hours just to untangle the mess, and you can't ask the last "consultant" because they wrote garbage code, threw it over the wall and disappeared. It's the reason I usually don't take Wordpress cases anymore unless it's someone I know or an installation I did, myself, from scratch that hasn't been messed with by anyone else.
Wordpress is a great blogging platform and basic CMS. It's when people start trying to make it do things beyond this that problems start to accrue. I don't hate Wordpress. I hate what people try to do with it.
When Wordpress is your hammer, everything looks like a custom post type.
Ugh, that just serves to remind me of the unholy, demented shapes I've seen (Fortune 500) companies are able to mangle SharePoint into. Customizability is usually a nice quality in general, but certainly not without any cost.
See: "how do I add a status for tickets?" [0]
[0] https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/creat...
Let me be a SOB for a second and ask for your opinion. I'm interested in freelancing with WordPress, mostly small company websites, would you still recommend it for someone who's just getting in the market?
TIA
It's all about what the client needs. The advice I give on this subject these days is that Wordpress is fine to use for a blog or a very basic, low traffic read-only company websites. Think like a small restaurant or something. The two things to be aware of:
1. Somebody has to support it, whether that be you or someone who comes after you. While Wordpress doesn't have as many security issues in and of itself as it used to, it still does have some occasionally and will still need to be patched up to more recent versions. Security vulnerabilities in Wordpress are almost immediately exploited, so the sooner you patch, the better.
2. The minute you start trying to push Wordpress beyond the bounds of being a basic CMS or blogging platform (like adding online ordering, inventory management, etc.) you are better off finding other, better suited options.
What better suited options? And why are they better for someone's small business or intention to sell a few products?
To be fair, the "online ordering" part is handled by services such as Paypal and Stripe. Wordpress is not doing the heavy lifting. Inventory is just a bunch of products sitting in the database. I'm not sure it's fair to describe this as "pushing beyond the bounds of a blogging platform". At the end of the day, you get a new item in the Wordpress admin "products". Click that, add products, enter prices.
Is it ideal? No. But what platform is that is affordable and predictable?
1. Switch to a hosted solution like Shopify for actual order processing, inventory, etc and keep Wordpress around for the read-only business type pages or blogs. Let each component do what it is best at.
2. Switch entirely to a hosted platform like Wix or Squarespace, which let you do both.
I have yet to encounter a Wordpress eCommerce plugin that wasn't, at some level, a disaster. Every one I have seen is janky and the code quality is usually quite poor.
There is also the security implications of doing this. Especially for small businesses, if you can't or don't want to pay someone to constantly patch Wordpress up against the most recent security issues [0] (again, in fairness, this is largely plugins and themes these days), you're taking a very real risk at having your installation hacked and possibly data exposed depending on the severity. I've seen Wordpress installs hacked within hours of a zero-day being dropped. Every plugin you bring in increases your attack surface, and the more complex the plugin, the larger the attack surface.
People really need to just let Wordpress be Wordpress. Wordpress was designed to be a blogging platform and basic CMS. Just because you can extend it beyond that doesn't mean it's a good idea. You can use a screwdriver as a hammer if you try hard enough, but that doesn't make it actually a hammer or the right tool to use.
[0] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=wordpress
Shopify isn't immune to vulnerabilities: https://infosecwriteups.com/how-i-gained-access-to-revenue-a...
I wouldn't recommend Shopify. Clunky, slow, overpriced. And business inventory shouldn't be outsourced and hosted on third party platforms.
Self-managed solutions offer more options to scale and add features, customization and generally taking control over the way your business is presented online. This matters, and customers notice the confidence of a business owning its online presence.
Doesn't need to be Wordpress, but even if it is, the option to use something like Snipcart is there if WooCommerce isn't wanted. No need to switch everything over to hosted solutions like Shopify.
> "You can use a screwdriver as a hammer if you try hard enough, but that doesn't make it actually a hammer or the right tool to use."
Not sure why you thought it necessary to expand "right tool, right job" into that longer version, but you're implying Shopify is the hammer. Why? Because it has "shop" in the name? They stack a bunch of technologies together just like everyone else. And with that comes attack surfaces and issues just like anyone else.
Also: Is he taking new contracts? =]
It's legit AWFUL. It's a reasonable blog engine, sure, but it's been forced into being a general CMS, and it was never built for that. Our corp site is on it, and I fucking HATE it (fortunately I rarely have to deal with it).
My personal blog (21 years old and counting) has been through a bunch of platforms (Blogger, Greymatter, Blosxom) before settling on Wordpress. As I said, as a blogging tool, it's mostly fine. I don't really HATE it there, but it's still too fiddly for my tastes.
Sometimes the answer is “oh god we can’t do that”… and that seemed to be ok if we had some alternatives
Community's reaction via comments' section [1] for Gutenberg plugin was a clear indication that people will eventually go away, had they not revoke their decision.
They haven't which led to the fork [2] of WordPress thus dividing the community, at least for a while.
Had they listened to their community to acquire Elementor and make it part of WP core, things would have been a lot better today than they currently are I'm afraid.
They have wasted countless resources and valuable time that could be poured in improving Elementor and WordPress in general.
I have tried to find tutorials, articles, and books about using FSE and couldn't find anything updated.
It's just sad to be honest with you...
[1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/gutenberg/
[2] https://www.classicpress.net/Currently I'm learning Laravel, because I have dealt with a lot of WordPress custom development and had lots of headaches, especially with multilanguage support.
I find it incredible it does not support such a standard feature and you are forced to buy a plugin that is actually a CMS written as a plugin...we are talking about an Inception type of thing, if you think about it with the whole CMS inside a CMS!
Madness, complete madness!
After having used it for years I can say it's an excellent product. Easy to setup, easy to learn (any Django dev can pick it up almost instantly), secure, has LTS versions. It's just an excellent CMS. It's the first product I reach for now when needing a CMS system.
I am not affiliated with Django CMS in any way, I just really love their product.
For the developer, WordPress used to be really easy to make add-ons for and customize. Now you need to know React to get the most of of WordPress, and if you're going to go through the trouble to get good with React, what are you going to do, use it to maintain WordPress sites or go get paid more to do React development?
Gutenberg and the changes associated with it do make a better site — but people didn't want a better site, they wanted a better WordPress.
I have tried to learn how to use it and have lost counting how many times they changed how it works as a whole.
You have no idea how excruciatingly painful is for me to use it that I have 22 years of professional experience with computers; imagine how non-tech savvy users feel when they try to use it!
Not all people are computer literate or are interested in technology in general, what they don't understand?!
Users want a tool to do their job and they want it to be stable, safe, and robust; don't change this concept or you will lose them on the spot, PERIOD!
Instead of letting Gutenberg as a plugin it originally were (well, technically it still is offered as a plugin, but that's another story) - so people can choose whether to use it or not - they forced it to the community and on top of that they are working non-stop on implementing new mechanisms or ideas that cancel previous features, thus leading to a mad chaos.
are you f**king kidding me? I've started to use pelican. It creates a flat file-based website with all I need. (See: https://blog.getpelican.com/)
Last time I did any work around WP this drove me insane. I remember trying to setup backup or something else simple and I was loosing my mind because there wasn't a single guide that just told you how to do it, they all beat around the bush and eventually the post just turns into a sales copy for their plugin/service/other overpriced bullshit.
Coming from the JS ecosystem, you realize just how different the culture is. Sure there are professional services in the JS ecosystem that cost money, but there's plenty of folks that are just trying to pay it forward and be helpful to the community, even the companies are good stewards. With Wordpress no, everyone is just out to make a quick buck selling you on something.
I recently engaged in a spirited discussion about this issue ( https://wptavern.com/wordpress-product-launches-roundup-appe... )
And it was uncovered that not only are people who are in close to the main development focused on releasing premium paid upgrades that require yearly fees - I contend that they are also holding back what should be basic styling options from being available in core as well.
( https://wptavern.com/wordpress-product-launches-roundup-appe... )
I mean, just wow.
We'll pay something like US$30k/year in eBay fees (including paid promotions) for a relatively small home-based operation. We're moving to a warehouse soon, so that might be another $20k/year in rent.
$30/year to solve a real problem our business has is a steal compared to this!
> If WordPress is shrinking, something else must be growing, this is, after all, a zero sum game. The very clear winners at the moment are Wix and Squarespace.
I disagree with the authors findings: When taking a look at the quaterly data https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma..., one can clearly see that WP and Shopify at least plateaued which is alright.
But the authors conclusion, that WP's loss gives points to Wix and SqSpace for me does not hold: The numbers for "None" still decreases and much more strongly than the two mentioned above.
He conveniently forgets the "None" partition, making is entire argument/criticism (for me) somewhat thin. He could in the same way argue, that Wix and Squarespace are more successful in getting non-CMS websites to switch.
Especially when, according to that same survey, it's up 1.7% since this time last year...
I think they could have avoided much of this by listening to these devs, having backwards compatible designs, and slowing down to produce higher quality code.
The block library stylesheet is awful, and there is also no interface to interact with it directly. Instead we get to edit a json file which gives us access to a few dozen properties and deal with that.
Not to mention the incomplete javascript and PHP interfaces which seem to be developed by two battling teams... :(
Just think about it: you need to have installed PHP, MySQL / MariaDB, and a plugin to generate static content, whereas with a SSG that exists you go straight to the phase of generating your content.
Personally I plan to use Hugo for tiny to small websites that get updated once in a blue moon and for more complicated websites, I have many options to choose from; for sure WordPress is not one of them and that's a fact!
My own website is built with Hugo, but based on my experience building WordPress websites and helping friends "using" them with basic HTML/CSS tips i wouldn't recommend that for everyone.
For instance, an example would be https://github.com/julianoappelklein/hokus which is a CMS front-end for Hugo.
Wordpress is not an ecommerce system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning ecommerce system made useful by the freemium plugins, security vulnerabilities and PHP comprising a full CMS as defined by POSIX.
But many creative types I know have used at least one if not both. We are not the intended market.
I think there's a (perhaps unintentional) true, deeper subtext to what you're saying though. WordPress has become too undifferentiated. There are parts of WP that are very mature and still as of yet unbeaten, but that's not what it takes to stay relevant.
I have an art degree.
But I'm not sure what that adds to the conversation without some background context on our requirements, use-cases or constraints?
(I’ve never used Wix myself, so it’s a real question.)
I wouldn't use Wix or similar for those things, but after seeing how someone less technical uses them, I see the appeal.
Unless you're after a custom job (Which most SMB's don't actually need), one of the DIY platforms are more than enough.
WordPresses UX and UI is horrible and confusing for most business owners -- take your developers hat off here.
While the editor UX continues to get more convoluted, so too does the DX. PHP and React interfaces grow further apart in their capabilities and it's really just outrageous to have to master so many things to create a simple block in the editor.
It's really just not worth the effort.
The dev time to keep the server running would be more than a squarespace subscription easily. And when the client stops needing changes, they only have to keep paying the monthly SS bill and require no help from the agency they originally went with. The place I worked at eventually went out of business and it was a nightmare for the clients who relied on us for hosting and modifications.
I'm trying to convince my partner to look into creating custom Shopify themes or plugins and possibly creating a full service consulting company.
- a good „MVC“ framework (Laravel, Rails, Django, Redwood) or a set of frontend focused libs and frameworks like Next+Prisma
- a css toolbox with predefined, common components, or a atmoic framework or something like scss, even plain css is expressive enough now.
- a cheap hosting option plus some minimal, light „devops“ automation.
Is all you need.
Builder.io looks promising?
So I guess you can say if your goal is just to send information and don’t have a need for profit, I would say Wordpress is a good fit.
Their Full Site Editing move became a lagging factor on their adoption. Specially when they complicated it further by marrying with React as their front-end counterpart.
I consider WordPress a legacy codebase, because they seem to be unable to drop PHP 5.6 support. Anything that doesn't conform to that standard when submitting a new plugin to their repository, gets rejected immediately (I've seen this first hand).
I understand that breaking with their PHP 5.6 past implies being reborn into a next generation CMS, because many shared hostings that are able to run WordPress are set up that way, that'd break a great part of that 42.9% of the Internet. It requires a complete rewrite and marking the current one as a legacy product. It's what holds them back, technologically-wise.
WordPress became the dinosaur it sought to destroy when Matt Mullenweg forked it from b2/cafelog.
If your product isn't matching customer requirements, or if you're trying to pull one of "I am the master and people will love what I do", you increase the risk of market contact dissonance, fancy term for: you're not responding to customers' needs or wants.
WordPress is a behemoth that has been losing touch with its customers, carried over in the meantime by the train of recommendations and network effects; but that bubble is about to explode, imho.
Or maybe I misunderstand what you’re saying.
From what I understand PHP 7.x onwards is awesome. I've not experienced that myself as I moved to Python 3.x long before PHP 7.x came out, but I trust the word of my friends.
Did I misread?
IMO, it's not enough to dictate that WP market share is really shrinking in any significant way just because it lost less than 1% in a few months. Let's see if the trend persist in the coming years to make statements like that.
The word "very" is misplaced. What I've noticed is that as soon as you add WooCommerce, you can forget about snappy performance. You may get "adequate" speed, but never "super fast". If I'm wrong, please point me to a WooCommerce site with snappy page loading speed.
The question is, do the conveniences, features and content control of Wordpress+WooCommerce outweigh the underwhelming site speed? Probably. Maybe.
I wish Wordpress would improve their built-in features rather than farming them out to one-trick plugins at $99 per year. Such as anti-fraud. I discovered recently that even defending against multiple orders placed over short time spans, requires a $99 subscription to the official plugin: https://woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-anti-fraud/
We had over 10,000 fake orders placed over the weekend from someone who apparently was testing credit cards. I never expected their transactions to actually be accepted by Stripe, or even make it through our checkout. Now I must pay the protection money in the form of the "anti fraud" plugin.
As for the anti-fraud plugin which use MaxMind database, could be worth that annual subscription compare to hire a developer and build the same backend for your business.
Notes from the post - The %is actually growing, ~41% to ~43%, minor drops in the last few months
The large point is how the CMS market has diversified, which is evident from the fact that the next largest player is Shopify at ~4%. CMS is too broad a term which envelops personal blogs to E-commerce.
The challenge Wordpress will have in the long run is trying to do everything for everyone and not being the best at anything.
Having been back on the saddle for the last 7 months, I do agree that FSE is an overly ambitious project that might take further 5 years to get it right. I don’t necessarily dislike it, though it doesn’t bother me either. If I want a site builder I will just use one of the established plugins.
I am more annoyed that the work being done on the actual content editor is subpar at best. Some core issues that still plague it are back to top clipping, slow performance of loading media, and extremely poor integration with block plugins.
But even with all the glaring issues, WordPress will remain a top choice for years to come. It’s so easy to get the site to do you want without needing to hire an agency that will leave a dent in your budget.
Nice to see people like Joost step up and talk about it.
I suspect W3techs is rolling out a change in their methodology.
Most small businesses can just use social media / menu hosting service.
Larger businesses can afford real CMS tools.
WordPress has gotten better in recent years, but it's still at core a "blog" platform. And frankly that makes all the themes and features either annoying duct-tapped in add-ons, or backward looking.
I recently tried configuring a new site for a neighbor. And it was OK, but like... the neighbor asked for some simple things: ADA Compliance, and No User Comments anywhere.
It was a hack, like it was a lot more work than it should have been to get him to the point where his theme actually worked the way he wanted it to.
On top of that... like it was just tedious to get ADA Compliance with some of the themes. They didn't use ARIA tags, or have good color pickers... worse, like you'd pick the color for one font, and it would use the color in the footer or some other place. Totally frustrating. And fixing all the things needed to get the site live made sure that he would never be able to ever upgrade that theme or theme builder tool. Oof.
It's very much a disposable site. One that isn't factoring in modern needs... forcing users to download add-ons instead of just having easy to customize templates for each page type build in to the core system... by default you only get Blog Post, and Page... but like I just want "Staff Bio" and "Product" and "Store Locations" and a bunch of other simple page types.
In the end... I just ended up moving him over to Squarespace, where most everything just worked without any dated "must be a blog platform first" notions. Oh, and the page editor... holy hell don't get me started on how clunky WordPress' page editor is. It's gotten better... it's just not good. Feels like they are still letting volunteer developers do the UX instead of investing in real UX designers.
Meh, it's free... and you get what you pay for. Eh, you actually get a huge headache with WordPress. I hate using WordPress, I can't recommend it to anyone.
They need to just ditch the notion that anyone wants to use it as a blogging platform, and convert it to a CMS-first platform. Then they might have a shot.
Right now I'm considering going the https://www.11ty.dev route instead. Anyone have any good experiences with it?
I recently built a blogging/gallery template that I'm very happy with. My goal is to keep it JS free. I originally wanted to apply it as a theme for PHP/WordPress, since I already had an older one I could rework. But it didn't feel like the end result with JS was worth it. Hence the static site generator route. In theory I think I'll have more control for exactly what I want.
One must wonder not why the market share is shrinking but why it is still a thing!
Not only it's buggy and hard to scale, but it's also costly! All the freemium plugins become very expensive! A nonprofit I was involved with had to pay thousands per year to keep an essential WooCommerce match at least 10% of the functionality of Shopify, which comes at a fraction of the price! Not to mention that WordPress still stores massive data structures as serialized arrays in single columns in old versions of MySQL, and the consistency of the data is only a matter of luck! Most plugins are written by amateurs and easily corrupt data! One such example is the famous (and expensive!) plugin GiveWP! With a very low-volume website, it kept corrupting the data. For months, their support tried to recover the data and couldn't!
The typical troubleshooting suggestion for any WordPress plugin is: to disable all plugins (in Production, yeah, with a capital "P" as it's scared) and give us full admin access to the site to troubleshoot! Unfortunately, when it comes to WordPress commercial plugins, it's the typical blame-the-others game - it's never the plugin that crashes. It's the other plugins that make it crush! It's so often to see the same jQuery plugin being loaded multiple times or multiple versions of it fighting with each other because different plugin vendors use different versions!
Please, do this world a favor and stop using WordPress!
Most of the frameworks and open source software is written by amateurs.
Sorry but I don't believe that for one second.
That seems an entirely different thing, unless there's something I'm missing.
I wasn’t doing the design work etc… but setting up some forwards and other in the weeds things wasn’t really bad at all.
I wouldn’t want to be the sole maintainer, but it’s really not the worst thing I’ve had to work with.
A sane framework might specify the URL(s) once in a config file and/or DB field, but ultimately leaving that side to the web server configuration where it belongs.
After that you can get into all the other issues people are talking about already.
Seriously? 0.4% is what article calls "shrinking"
No it isn't. Lost me here.