I think the "private website" space is shrinking - despite what adverts for Wix and Squarespace might infer.
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 previously a PM at a company where I got to interview a lot of content creators on various platforms (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc). Specifically creators with large enough followings where it was their sole source of income (typically $1K-$10K per month).
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 look at some of the channels I've subscribed to on YouTube - I have absolutely no idea if any of them have a personal website, since I have never had a reason to check.
Personal websites for Youtubers don't really make sense unless they have some kind of format that can't be handled via videos, playlists, or their descriptions.
The only ones I've seen for Youtubers are cooking channels, where the description format is very poor for recipes.
I only stopped checking the websites of a couple YouTube channels I follow, because they stopped updating them reliably. I preferred that to checking on YouTube, because sometimes it takes me a bit to find a simple chronological list of videos from a channel, while the sites were just that, right on the front page.
Sharing this experience. Having a few friends who have small gardening or construction businesses, but none of them have a website. If I ask why, they tell me they already have too much work. A website or any kind of marketing on top of mouth to mouth would only add on top of that.
For years now, I've seen many restaurants rely on an Instagram account instead of an actual website. It's definitely easier for them to create an IG account than to pay someone (or a service) for a website. Also, posting to IG lets them market to their audience (instead of posting it to a website that presumably fewer people visit).
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.
So it sounds like the restaurants are overestimating how well an instagram account responds to their needs. Maybe they do need to invest in a more traditional web page after all. I'll happily disregard any restaurant that forces me to log on whatever platform to view their menu.
But by catering to the Instagram crowd, they drive more engagement from the people on that platform. Maybe they are leaving money on the table, but if they are happy with the current performance, then that is their decision.
I think some of this is the result of how terrible Google search has gotten, although it maybe a chicken and the egg issue. It is just so much easier to find small businesses/individuals on social media/aggregators than on Google.
> 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.
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.
They'll still want your phone number and carrying a second phone just for those moments is a bit of a hassle.
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.
You've nailed it. RIP WordPress and websites. <sarcasm>Delete that Safari icon, it's annoying.</sarcasm>
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.
I find Google Maps is often out of date. Many a time I've headed into a small village to visit cafe Google Maps recommended only to find out it's been closed for 9 month.
WP is just very famous so clients often require it and know it. I don't think it has ever been choice developers would go for if they didn't have to.
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.
IMO Wordpress is very much in the domain of the SEO / Adwords crowd. People that want their site to rank and bring in traffic for ads. There are millions upon millions of domains that people want to make money on.
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.
As a business owner I can tell that a business can be pretty successful with just a Facebook page, an Instagram profile and Whatsapp as a contact channel. No website needed.
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".
I see saying, blogs have definitely been shrinking. The web is too large and complex to be discovered unless your service is within one of the 5 or so major social platforms. To own a domain is almost a status symbol, letting users know “we are an established entity”.
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.
The fact that we’ve overcomplicated the skill set needed to maintain a “modern” website has helped contribute to this problem. A static website could be so bloody simple. Just save a bloody Word document to HTML with your pictures and menu and telephone number and open hours and links to maps and upload it to a folder. But… Even basic file handling skills are becoming uncommon.
> Even basic file handling skills are becoming uncommon.
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.
> I think the "private website" space is shrinking - despite what adverts for Wix and Squarespace might infer.
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.
I think the real target market is plugin developers, who love the fact that you can get people to pay annual subscriptions for plugins providing some of the most mundane features I have ever seen.
Serious businesses don't go after the "free" concept, but prefer to pay thousands of dollars using CMS that well-known and experienced companies design and implement.
An example of such CMS for dedicated industries would be Adobe Experience Manager [1], previously known as Adobe CQ5.
Or (at least where I am) I'm seeing ServiceNow appear - It's a e2e process engine, which just happens to also have GUI components that take the place of a traditional CMS.
Auto dealerships are a good example. They are run by some local guy who gets a little bit of support from corporate and probably has a low cost marketing agency. But none of them use Wordpress as there are CMSs for the industry. I don’t remember the old ones but the new startupy one is actually awesome but cannot seem to find their company name.
We can make assumptions all day but for me, the worst thing about WordPress is EASILY Plugin Hell.
I 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.
WordPress backend code is insane, but it is one of the few systems in widespread usage where you can reliably reverse engineer your way to solving bugs or making changes with minimal knowledge and effort.
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.
I've been looking at replacing my project's website with Hugo (https://gohugo.io). Rather than generating a web page dynamically every time someone comes to your site, you generate the entire website statically whenever you change something. That means hosting can be entirely a "dumb" web server (or a "dumb" web server + apis which feed info to javascript, if you really need it). It also means:
* 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.
There's also a plugin for Wordpress (SimplyStatic, I believe) that creates a static copy of your site. I use it in conjuction with bitbucket and netlify, and it works quite well.
And the dumb web server can be Firebase Hosting, Netlify, Vercel, CloudFlare Pages, with extremely generous free tiers and practically zero maintenance.
As someone with probably 30+ sites built with Kirby I’d agree that it’s better than WP in many ways but it’s very developers oriented and it’s not really a replacement for WP for the average user.
And when I say developers oriented I mean it in a good way.
Entirely agree with that assessment. All my clients love the Kirby backend and as a developer it’s a pleasure to work with the system.
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.
Publii is an alternative to publish a simple blog for free without paying for hosting from your own computer. It's much, much more simple and limited than WordPress, but this is its strength for some people.
I have been running a few WordPress sites for like 10 years now and never had any of them randomly break, I just use a few core plugins and two premium themes and update them once in a while.
I pay a small amount extra a month for my host to manage upgrades of my own WordPress sites and common plugins, I keep things simple on purpose to minimise the plugin hell you mention.
As much as I can do this myself, I can't guarantee timely updates as a private individual.
I've migrated 2 WP sites (one for work, one for a local club) to github pages to reduce the maintenance pain of WordPress.
Wix and Squarespace are imo infinitely harder to make look good/maintain than Wordpress (at least without Gutenburg). Just some basic tasks are needlessly difficult or impossible. I still think Wordpress is the go-to easy to build/maintain CMS.
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).
The problem with Wordpress isn't the ease of use, its the constant maintenance required. If you are a local restaurant, you don't need an extremely powerful and flexible framework. You need something that is always online, doesn't get hacked, doesn't have its certificates expire, doesn't run out of disk space because of a log file, doesn't get stuck on a 5 year old debian, 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.
agree that the non-stop overly frequent maintenance is a serious pain point for site owners and developers.
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.
Wordpress doesn't actually require that much maintenance at all, I feel like this is a myth or because people have only dealt with very old Wordpress builds. Wordpress now has automatic updates built into it, and large agencies or companies automate updates otherwise.
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.
Wix and Squarespace aren't free though. Per workhour, Wordpress is still probably one of the, if not the, cheapest CMS for businesses to use for a basic website.
Does the wordpress commercial offering not solve this issue ? Maybe I am wrong, but I understood it also as setup and forget. Any users of wordpress.com could provide more information..
Well it definitely does improve the security on the "Wordpress" part, but there's still the custom plugins to worry about. Sure, the Woo* plugins and other premium offerings are great, but there's still lots of niche plugins that don't work together with each other, or break on newer WP versions, etc.
The subjective part is "look good". I've sent at least a dozen small business to Squarespace and helped them get it tuned -- the look has always been "good enough" for them to move on to real business problems. It gets their information into Google (et al), provides the domain to link to from their IG, FB, Twitter, etc, etc -- so those traffic sources resolve to their own main truth.
I’ve replaced about five or six different WP installs with square space now. Never had a problem with it looking good, and surely don’t miss the increased vulnerability footprint that comes with hosting WP.
The only people I know who hate Wordpress are the developers who have had the misfortune of having to manage an instance of Wordpress. All the marketing and content people I have worked with love it.
This. I have a sales person and a designer that maintain our Wordpress instance. I login to the admin panel once every few months. Mostly these people do everything by themselves.
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).
WordPress is stupid easy to wrangle into what you want it to. That's the best thing about it and the worst, because you have a bunch of people who have no idea what they're doing doing high-profile things. As a freelancer, WordPress paid for my house. Naysayers are just elitists without a cause.
You can add to that "people who manage web hosting servers".
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.
> according to their industry, WordPress is leading the security space
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.
And SOC/CSIRT folks. A staggering amount of incidents involve an external wordpress install used as free real estate by threat actors in some way (e.g. phishing kit, malware infra).
Wordpress code base is the best argument for the MVC design pattern specifically because it shows what goes wrong when you toss the idea of encapsulation out the window.
I wouldn't specifically say "MVC"; one could argue it's the best argument for many design patterns or QA approaches, as it flagrantly ignores all of them.
I've done some Wordpress consulting work in the past. I wouldn't say I hate Wordpress. I advocate for it's use in some cases! I think it is a fantastic piece of software for what it natively does.
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.
> It's when people start trying to make it do things beyond this that problems start to accrue.
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.
Jira is just infuriating. It is super configurable, but that configurability comes the cost of making it so ridiculously complicated almost to the point of unusability.
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?
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.
> (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?
What I usually recommend at that point is that users do one of two things:
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.
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.
I wonder how the code looks like. Back in pre PHP5 days, it was surprisingly painful to read their docs (globals and side effects) and plugins source was just shocking. Angry 17yo levels of dirt loc (and that's insulting to 17yo)
The core is not too bad in the sense that it's stable, well-maintained, and mostly well-documented. The online code reference is also pretty great. The quality of the code is otherwise atrocious. Nobody should look at WordPress for any sort of guidance on what good code looks like.
...which is sort of like saying "the only people who hate Wordpress are the people who have to use it."
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.
The other cohort of people who hate Wordpress are marketing/content people who've had the pleasure of using an install that lacks full-time developer maintenance for long enough for it to break, and being "stuck" with that breakage (or, worse, wading into the freelance market trying to find someone to fix it without a scratch rewrite).
The matches my experience. They can manage whatever web of crazy they want in Wordpress… if they need something from the dev side we can play with some plugins until it works.
Sometimes the answer is “oh god we can’t do that”… and that seemed to be ok if we had some alternatives
WordPress will continue losing market share for the simplest reason: people fed up with the coercion of Full-Site Editing (FSE) by Automattic.
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.
I used to tell people WP is a solid base to build your website if you know what you're doing, but with Gutenberg and not knowing how much longer the Classic Editor plugin will be supported I keep my WP praise to myself.
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!
4 years ago my team built out a new CMS website for a large media company that had many different sub brands and multiple language requirements. We did a lengthy comparison against a big range or CMS solutions, we found Django CMS https://www.django-cms.org/en/ fulfilled all our requirements the best.
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 non-dev user, Gutenberg takes longer and is more fiddly to do what the old editor used to do, breaks a lot of old themes/plugins, and makes it harder and harder to use the old editor/themes/and similar.
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.
They forced it down to people's throats without listening to anyone's reactions or objections.
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.
Do you have the same impression: Each and every plugin/extension has a commercial pro version that keeps on nagging to buy its extended warrenty ... sorry, no, to subscribe to updates for just 29.99 each, right? So 29.99 for instagram connections, 39.99 for backups pro (i'm making names and prices up, but you know the drill.) and for just 20 dollars more a security/virus check for ... what?!?!
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/)
It's not just the plugins, this culture seeps into just about every guide about Wordpress. Read any guide and it's almost never a person that is just offering helpful advice, it's almost always some SEO spam that leads you on only to hit you with "buy my services/plugins/etc to fix this problem".
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.
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.
Honestly, those prices you mentioned are peanuts for a business customer.
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!
The fact you are being downvoted for saying this tells me more about the kind of people criticizing WordPress because of Gutenberg/update_cycles/but_what_about_bad_plugins/i_am_the_only_one_who_knows_hwo_to_write_good_wordpress_code_and_everyone_else_suck_at_this_but_me in this thread.
Are you running a basic blog? We have some WordPress sites that are sorta unloved, but they are able to use these commercial plugins for a few hundred bucks to enable custom forms, payments, event ticketing, event calendars and they're just one-click installs and some CSS.
> 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.
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.
I agree. Given the rounding (43.0 and 42.9 could theoretically just be a 0.01 difference) & measuring bias there might be no declining effect here at all.
A .4% loss in share since February, according to one website? Isn't that a little small and short-term to draw such a firm conclusion? or am I missing something significant?
Especially when, according to that same survey, it's up 1.7% since this time last year...
Is it just me, or is WP's new block-based editor (Gutenberg) easily the worst of its kind? I maintain a small blog for translations on WP, and each time I'm trying to do anything non-trivial it's a massive pain, with obvious and infuriating UI bugs and glitches. I've seriously been considering switching to self-hosted SSG, but many of the people I work with aren't all that familiar with Markdown or Git to be able to do that well enough.
Freelance developers selling WordPress to their clients (and who build custom themes and plugins) are being ignored by WP core and they are regularly broken by changes. It seems like Automatic is optimizing for Wix marketshare and abandoning some of it's key champions.
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.
Strange to hear BC breaks are common since its architecture screams procedural and dated. Though some of that could be they still technically support PHP 5.
Gutenberg brings React and a block architecture. That blurs the lines between "chrome" and end-user styles. This is more at the CSS and React level. The amount of !important CSS rules going into core is kind of terrifying.
The amount of time I spend in a specificity war between theme styles and wp core's ever-changing sheets is far too much!
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... :(
An alternative explanation: people who use Wordpress are those with personal blogs and they are being visited less, thus less present in top Alexa Rank sites.
There was a ramp up of new WordPress and specifically WooCommerce sites starting in late summer of 2020 and spiking huge in December 2020 & January 2021. These are people that were stuck at home due to lockdown or losing their jobs and they started online businesses. The lot of those signed up for 1 or 2 year hosting plans and those came due around Feburary/March of this year. A large amount of those businesses failed, or the owners went back to work, etc etc, and no longer need their sites.
This is a plausible explanation considering that the drop in market share is not that big. It would be interesting to compare the numbers from the past two years.
Most users of WordPress would be better served by a static site generator system. Unfortunately, it seems most of these are very much "by developers, for developers" in flavor. They're overly complicated and insufficiently developed in the front-end to be useful to most of WordPress' current target market (e.g., businesses with a need to present mostly static content, but with the ability to make changes and deploy/publish them without too much technical know-how required).
WordPress can be used as a static site generator via the Simply Statuc plugin. It needs some thought into the design ( which plugins won't work because it isn't dynamic anymore), but it's a decent way of having the UX for non-developers/other very technical folk while having the security, stability, deployability and maintainability of static hosting.
You do realize that this whole concept is an overkill, don't you?
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!
Of course it's overkill, but i prefer that than to "force" marketing and adjacent people to learn Markdown and maybe even HTML/CSS ( at least the basics).
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.
What's old is new again? Before WordPress started to eat everything, Blogger, Movable Type, and other popular publishing platforms were all static site generators. Dynamic platforms were too complicated and resource intensive for the masses.
It is shrinking because they have decided to pivot to Gutenberg. What they don't realise is that there is a major cottage industry of people developing custom themes for their clients, who use things like WooCommerce for selling. These people know how Wordpress works through the old, classic system of themes but couldn't care less about block themes.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Wordpress,
is in fact, Plugin-hell/Wordpress, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Plugins plus Wordpress.
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.
You have confused Operating System with Content Management System here...POSIX has nothing to do with CMS; as its name stands POSIX means "Portable Operating System Interface".
Who's still using Alexa? The quality of data is only as good as the people using the service. I haven't seen a single person who uses Alexa as a plugin or as a service in ages so I don't know how to treat this data. The only companies with a legit data would be search engines and browsers.
Sorta, kinda. Some of us do agency work for clients. We're consulted for our expertise to help medium to large companies avoid pitfalls like vendor lock-in (relevant in this case), performance bottlenecks, and cumbersome content management. We're then paid to implement those solutions in a creative, strategic and compelling way. I don't know if it'll hold my interest, but it was certainly a way to get into the industry. It's a great fit for anyone who's passionate about advertising, marketing, and technology.
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.
In my opinion, the main difference between those is that you can self-host WordPress, so you can have full control over your site. Wix and Squarespace are hosted on their own servers. It's a lot easier, from a development point of view, to customize WordPress to do what you want.
A friend of mine has a Wix account for who knows why. We were planning an event and he asked me to make a web page for it. I didn’t have the free cycles to do it at that moment, but he came back to me with a mostly finished Wix website a couple of hours later. I’ve gotta say, while I’m not interested in using it, I was impressed with how quickly someone less technical was able to get something decent up and running.
If you generate a static page, you have to upload it to something to host it. Wix and Squarespace handle that "last mile" for you. You drag and drop things to get the layout you want, click the publish button, and it's live. They also support things like response forms, etc., that you'd otherwise have to manage yourself.
I wouldn't use Wix or similar for those things, but after seeing how someone less technical uses them, I see the appeal.
This isn't really a constructive or useful comment. From what I saw, designers were able to build with Squarespace most of the stuff the devs were doing in wordpress and the sites were more reliable and cost less in the long run.
Gutenberg is not a good product, and while I understand why it exists, it feels absolutely ridiculous that the WordPress team keeps charging ahead with it.
I 100% agree with you here. Clients have an awful time working with Gutenberg.
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.
The problem we have is that getting traffic to a website is expensive and difficult compared to 5-10 years ago. This is really problematic for small businesses that just want traffic for search from local visits or in a niche category. Wordpress losing market ins't surprising, hosting costs money - and the choices for WP are pay wordpress dot com or get a shared hosting account like it's 2004. Facebook pages are free. Search isn't delivering traffic. Instagram, Facebook Pages, Google My Business, etc... are all making to cost of maintaining a nice website simply not worth it.
I'm interested to hear from other people who are bearish on Wordpress' future. Where are you headed? We agree with many of the points the author raised, as well as some additional pain points regarding general maintenance and design decisions (too many ways to do the same thing). Decoupled, static content generators seem to be the direction the industry is heading, but so far we've had trouble finding a content model creation, organization and editing experience that is as mature, reliable and affordable as WordPress.
WordPress is still at 43% according to this post. That is still remarkable and to me means WP will be hanging around for many years to come even if they lose some share
Squarespace, wix, and shopify are the main ones that come to mind. In 2016 my job used to be mainly wordpress stuff and it was an absolute nightmare keeping the servers running and things up to date.
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.
After taking a stab into building with Gutenberg I'm incredibly bearish. Automatic has abandoned both of its customers, plugin/theme developers and non-technical website owners, due to, imo, huge amount of VC funding it took on. Gutenberg is at best, half baked and broken and at worst an ever changing API of compromises.
I'm trying to convince my partner to look into creating custom Shopify themes or plugins and possibly creating a full service consulting company.
I am bearish and just waiting for someone to figure out a solid middle ground between a drag-and-drop pagebuilder + content-as-data. Gutenberg ain't it.
I’ve been managing (volunteer) a Wordpress site for 12 years now for a non-profit organization that hosts a university competition. They post about 1 or 2 times a month, and I created a registration form and email confirmation. All free. The only fees they pay are server hosting and domain name. I think we have paid on average around $40 a year. So for the past decade, they spent $500 on website fees and no ads.
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.
To further extend my own comment: I don't know if you believe in "technical debt" but there's definitely the existence of "product debt".
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.
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.
Maybe I misread things, but this chart of market share is not declining in any real sense, its 1 percentage point variance in 43% share. So its 2% variance of their market share.
I don't think you misread. This post makes a lot of assumptions based on a small change, in a brief time frame.
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.
> "It's very possible to make super fast sites on WordPress..."
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.
In my case, I haven’t tried to optimize database that run Woocommerce, still, there is some sluggish performance need to manually remove require complicate coding.
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.
I'm continuing to use my own blogs/websites (not as much as social media, as much as an information store for myself as for my tiny audiences, not monetised) as an insurance; we have zero control over the data we post on any popular social media platform. One day it could suddenly disappear for a number of reasons - technical fault, decision by the platform provider, interference by the authorities, malicious destruction etc...
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.
Like some already said, WordPress also paid for a lot of things in my life. And recently I was on a 3 year hiatus from the platform because of real life situation.
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.
The glitchy / beta (alpha?) level performance testing tools introduced by Google in the last two years have also been contributing to the lower scores and the constant changing of the scoring metrics has not helped developers such as myself get a strong hold on what Google wants. We are just now within the last 6 months really getting a strong foothold on things like CLS when using page builder plugins such as SiteOrigin Page Builder. They added a features in October last year that really knocks the CLS to zero and we've seen mobile scores way up in the 90-100 range now. WordPress can perform well with a well implemented caching system such as the one WPEngine setup on Google Cloud.
Maybe I've gotten something wrong here, but as far as I can tell, Wix and Squarespace are entirely closed-source hosted solutions. This might be a small and hard to verify decline, but it still makes me kind of sad to see more things moving from something you at least can host yourself if you want to something entirely proprietary. Wordpress may have its warts, but you can still actually get the code, and it still works mostly okay and can easily be hosted yourself in a wide variety of ways. If you want to hack it to do something weird or crazy, you actually can. IMO that beats locking everything into some company's system that you may not be able to extract or change.
In March, a number of technologies that were growing quickly on W3techs suddenly went flat or declining (Shopify and WordPress are examples). Others experienced a sudden surge (Squarespace, Wix).
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.
This is not surprising. The WordPress scene is super confusing right now. I spent almost 5 years building WordPress websites professionally and stopped a few years go. If I would need to build a WordPress site today, I would not know if I should start. Even the themes at WordPress.com (the hosted "user-friendly" version) have wildly different editing experiences.
Recently I considered building a new site with WordPress. I haven't used it in years, and looking at it again I didn't think it's the right fit anymore. It feels too limiting maybe?
Right now I'm considering going the https://www.11ty.dev route instead. Anyone have any good experiences with it?
So, Wordpress, with its very flexible schemas and tens of thousands of plugins, and total freedom to do whatever with custom php is "too limiting" but a static site generator is not? Maybe have another look?
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.
I still haven’t get the approximate number of plugins, assume I checked the WordPres sitemap of plugins seem to be less than “tens of thousands” (excluded those that are already outdated)?
I've used 11ty and quite a few other static site builders (Hugo, jekyll) and also wordpress and Craft CMS. But by far the best I've used is Astro, similar to 11ty but much more simpler to build with and much more powerful IMO
WordPress is the most giant bowl of spaghetti code in existence ever!
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!
I have experience with both shopify and woocommerce and the difference is WooCommerce can be free if you spend the time or use free plugins. You can do anything with WooCommerce you can do somethings with shopify. Shopify has a base cost plus additional costs for anything but you can dump money on both.
Most of the frameworks and open source software is written by amateurs.
All extensions have annual pricing, and WooCommerce requires expensive hosting, so Shopify is definitely cheaper and more convenient if you use their merchant service and their credit card reader, which is integrated into their inventory tracking (the WooCommerce inventory tracking is a joke, and it only kind of works if you use Square).
Probably you haven't checked the abusive pricing at WooComemrce.com! You need a paid plugin for almost everything - like product brands and extensions to their "free" Storefront theme - to implement basic functionality like blog support, payment methods, subscriptions, membership, etc. Plus, all this is considering your time being worth $0/hr, which is not the case even in the world's poorest country! All the headaches, the expensive hosting you need (you can't run WooCommerce on a cheap server), the maintenance, etc. - WooCommerce has become one of the most costly platforms. In addition, when you have to do something yourself, you are faced with the lack of the documentation and using the tables designed for posts to be abused for all kinds of other stuff - you can really use SQL, but you need to use PHP code to even do basic DB queries!
tons of people use linktree on social media sites like Instagram or TikTok where linking to things is particularly hard (i.e. links are not clickable anywhere except the one link slot in your bio). Sites like linktree let people make a little landing page with links to all their other stuff, which is often enough for many people.
When I found out the landing page at a previous job was Wordpress based I was a little miffed, but in practice it wasn’t that bad to work with for what I needed.
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.
WordPress plugins (and themes) are plagued by freemium versions. SEO has been gamed. Gone are the days of finding a non-freemium, single functionality plugin, that just works. You have to be a seasoned WP developer to wade thru all the crap that is the WP ecosystem, or if all else fails, write your own functionality via functions.php.
Buddypress's commercial fork, buddyboss, is doing better than Buddypress. Any users of Buddyboss, need reviews as i am planning to use it for a community project.
Wordpress is a cunt, it is fundamentally flawed in its design. The amount of hoop jumping to change the URL of a site is fucking insane (the site's URL is strewn all throughout the database...).
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.
Maybe what's losing market share is the monolithic 'CMS'. Content, for lack of a better term, has long since outgrown the hoary confines of tools like WP.
Small businesses need mostly static sites that are easy to update content on. The non-static functionality some businesses need is generally quite constrained: appointment setting and information request forms being the two most likely, and there are plenty of X-as-a-service offerings in that space.
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?