Live data from Hacker News

WordPress’ market share is shrinking

joost.blog

41–50 of 229 posts

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#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 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.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#42

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…

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.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#43
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.

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.

[0] https://phptherightway.com/

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#44

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?

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#45

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".

You've confused a joke with a serious post here.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#47
post #14
post #11

linktree is a very lightweight alternative that i see a lot of people use

https://linktr.ee ? That seems an entirely different thing, unless there's something I'm missing.

A good chunk of current WP use cases can be handled by a linktree.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#48

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.

You underestimate how many small business sites are built with WordPress

Not just small businesses, either: https://wordpress.com/notable-users/

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#49
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…

What are the dedicated CMS for industries? And do they cost the same as WordPress (free)?

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.

  [1] https://business.adobe.com/cy_en/products/experience-manager/headless-cms.html

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#50
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.

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.
Post reply on HN