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WordPress’ market share is shrinking

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Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#191

Post by nhumrich »

albatrosstrophy wrote: post #91
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…

I host a hobby website and use WordPress for everything. Even as an entry level user, I agree the amount of plugins are ridiculous. But it's free and I only pay for hosting. Anyone knows what are the alternatives for someone like me?

Web flow

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#192

Post by peckrob »

exodust wrote: post #104
peckrob wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

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.

[0] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=wordpress

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#193

Post by znpy »

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…

> Even local restaurants seem to be changing - using aggregators as their primary touch-point.

My favourite restaurant has a website.

It's broken because "php couldn't find the necessary mysql extension to use Wordpress".

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#194

Post by jjdeveloper »

aceazzameen wrote: post #36

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?

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

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#195

Post by Yabood »

rograndom wrote: post #188

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 faile…

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.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#196

Post by akagusu »

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…

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".

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#197

Post by ubermonkey »

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.

...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.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#198

Post by lucideer »

hattmall wrote: post #177
lucideer wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes and no.

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.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#199

Post by peckrob »

scrame wrote: post #127
hyperdimension wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

see also: jira

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.

See: "how do I add a status for tickets?" [0]

[0] https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/creat...

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#200

Post by sofixa »

stefanos82 wrote: post #190
sofixa wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cho…

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.

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