WordPress’ market share is shrinking • Hacker News Board

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#91

Post by albatrosstrophy » Thu, May 12, 2022, 2:41 AM UTC

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?

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#92

Post by Gigachad » Thu, May 12, 2022, 2:45 AM UTC

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 have someone fiddle with squarespace for twice as long as they would wordpress, that's ok because its now set and forget.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#93

Post by Gigachad » Thu, May 12, 2022, 2:50 AM UTC

CSSer wrote: post #17

I'm interested to hear from other people who are bearish on Wordpress' future. Where are you headed? We agree with many of the points the author raised, as well as some additional pain points regarding general maintenance and design decisions (too many ways to do the same thing). Decoupled, static content generators seem to be the direction the industry is heading, but so far we've had trouble finding a content model…

Squarespace, wix, and shopify are the main ones that come to mind. In 2016 my job used to be mainly wordpress stuff and it was an absolute nightmare keeping the servers running and things up to date.

The dev time to keep the server running would be more than a squarespace subscription easily. And when the client stops needing changes, they only have to keep paying the monthly SS bill and require no help from the agency they originally went with. The place I worked at eventually went out of business and it was a nightmare for the clients who relied on us for hosting and modifications.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#94

Post by Gigachad » Thu, May 12, 2022, 2:51 AM UTC

justinator wrote: post #4

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

This isn't really a constructive or useful comment. From what I saw, designers were able to build with Squarespace most of the stuff the devs were doing in wordpress and the sites were more reliable and cost less in the long run.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#95

Post by marc_io » Thu, May 12, 2022, 2:53 AM UTC

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?

Publii is an alternative to publish a simple blog for free without paying for hosting from your own computer. It's much, much more simple and limited than WordPress, but this is its strength for some people.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#96

Post by ldiracdelta » Thu, May 12, 2022, 2:58 AM UTC

subtledigital wrote: post #28

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.

"DIY platforms" Do you mean wix et c. ? Or `create-react-app`

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#97

Post by exodust » Thu, May 12, 2022, 2:58 AM UTC

> "It's very possible to make super fast sites on WordPress..."

The word "very" is misplaced. What I've noticed is that as soon as you add WooCommerce, you can forget about snappy performance. You may get "adequate" speed, but never "super fast". If I'm wrong, please point me to a WooCommerce site with snappy page loading speed.

The question is, do the conveniences, features and content control of Wordpress+WooCommerce outweigh the underwhelming site speed? Probably. Maybe.

I wish Wordpress would improve their built-in features rather than farming them out to one-trick plugins at $99 per year. Such as anti-fraud. I discovered recently that even defending against multiple orders placed over short time spans, requires a $99 subscription to the official plugin: https://woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-anti-fraud/

We had over 10,000 fake orders placed over the weekend from someone who apparently was testing credit cards. I never expected their transactions to actually be accepted by Stripe, or even make it through our checkout. Now I must pay the protection money in the form of the "anti fraud" plugin.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#98

Post by ldiracdelta » Thu, May 12, 2022, 3:06 AM UTC

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.

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#99

Post by karaterobot » Thu, May 12, 2022, 3:12 AM UTC

A .4% loss in share since February, according to one website? Isn't that a little small and short-term to draw such a firm conclusion? or am I missing something significant?

Especially when, according to that same survey, it's up 1.7% since this time last year...

Re: WordPress’ market share is shrinking

#100

Post by justinator » Thu, May 12, 2022, 3:23 AM UTC

haswell wrote: post #15

justinator wrote: post #4

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

The HN community is a bubble. I doubt very many people who participate here would either. But many creative types I know have used at least one if not both. We are not the intended market.

>But many creative types I know have used at least one if not both. We are not the intended market.

I have an art degree.