61–70 of 229 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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
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.
I've worked with WP for years and now run an agency. Unless you're after a custom job (Which most SMB's don't actually need), one of the DIY platforms are more than enough. WordPresses UX and UI is horrible and confusing for most business owners -- take your developers hat off here.
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.
It's really just not worth the effort.
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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
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…
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)?
Some of these will be built on Wordpress, others custom, but once you notice one for an industry you’ll see it everywhere.
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!
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…
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.
From the blog post: > 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. I disagree with the authors findings: When taking a look at the quaterly data https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma... , one can clearly see that WP and Shopify at least plateaued which is alright. But the authors con…