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WordPress’ market share is shrinking

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Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#171

Post by nulbyte »

dspillett wrote: post #152
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 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…

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.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#172

Post by rhd »

technion wrote: post #27
siquick wrote: post #9

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.

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.

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).

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#173

Post by homero »

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 noticed Instagram only businesses. Hired a window tinting and pressure washer from there.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#174

Post by goldcd »

TheRealNGenius wrote: post #117
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…

*imply. Not infer. Inferring is what I do after they imply.

How right you are.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#175

Post by Robotbeat »

ivanmontillam wrote: post #41

I agree with the article author. 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 immediatel…

Is it a good idea to drop PHP support? PHP is very powerful and for all the hate, has a relatively gentle learning curve.

Or maybe I misunderstand what you’re saying.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#176

Post by sidlls »

ldiracdelta wrote: post #98
stakkur wrote: post #55

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.

Yes. Small businesses need microservices.

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.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#177

Post by hattmall »

lucideer wrote: post #165
dpcan wrote: post #12

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 nig…

These are the symptoms but the cause is deeper. 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 / firefight…

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.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#178

Post by sidlls »

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).

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#179

Post by Robotbeat »

kstrauser wrote: post #79
justinator wrote: post #4

Chances I will ever use Squarespace or Wix: 0%.

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.

What does Wix do for your friend that you couldn’t do in Microsoft Word (which makes acceptable HTML static pages)?

(I’ve never used Wix myself, so it’s a real question.)

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#180

Post by vatotemking »

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.
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