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WordPress’ market share is shrinking

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Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#101

Post by mbesto »

goldcd wrote: post #23

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 Ins…

> 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.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#102

Post by calcsam »

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.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#103

Post by gibletsingravy »

kstrauser wrote: post #77
stefanos82 wrote: post #5

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 l…

What’s wrong with Gutenberg? I haven’t been following along with this at all.

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.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#104

Post by exodust »

peckrob wrote: post #62
nukst wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you peckrob, this was very insightful. 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

Not a bad question at all. 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 issue…

> (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?

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#105

Post by macintux »

mbesto wrote: post #101
goldcd wrote: post #23

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 Ins…

> 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.

Speaking as an abstainer from all things Meta, that's depressing.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#106

Post by yen223 »

austinl wrote: post #53
goldcd wrote: post #23

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 Ins…

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 s…

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.

I don't think I'm alone in this regard.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#107

Post by skilled »

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.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#108

Post by exodust »

nikolay wrote: post #67

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…

> 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

Sorry but I don't believe that for one second.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#109

Post by d3nj4l »

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.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#110

Post by naravara »

Gigachad wrote: post #92
partiallypro wrote: post #6

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 pa…

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 hav…

Doesn’t Wordpress own Tumblr which ticks all the boxes you just described?
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