4 ms·

What's the average use case for WP these days? Shopify has probably eaten all the WP ecommerce sites. Blogging has probably moved to Medium, Substack, static

by pier25 6y ago

What's the average use case for WP these days? Shopify has probably eaten all the WP ecommerce sites. Blogging has probably moved to Medium, Substack, static sites, etc.

Giorgi 6y ago
What? woocommerce is viewed as next step from Shopify and Medium/Substack is basically graveyard at this point
- pier25 6y ago
  > woocommerce is viewed as next step from Shopify Is it? I honestly thought it was they other way around. > Medium/Substack is basically graveyard at this point This is definitely not true. Just look at how many Medium articles are shared to HN daily: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=medium.com&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
rchaud 6y ago
Plenty of use cases, especially if you want to maintain control over your digital presence instead of handing everything over to third parties. - Ecommerce store via WooCommerce - Online Course via Learndash LMS - Lead Generation/Capture via WPForms, or other plugins.
scarecrowbob 6y ago
We do a lot of customer-facing CMSs using it. We're rebuilding the Social Security Admin's customer-facing blog system... it's already WordPress, but we are building out additional functionality and creating a more accessible theme in addition to some other work. We have quite a few NGOs and large enterprises which we do that kind of work for.... it's a very popular and easy to use system for non-technical users who need to manage content.
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
> Blogging has probably moved to Medium, Substack, static sites, etc. Where are you getting this information? WP is an order of magnitude larger than all of them combined for blogging. Matt Mullenweg's 50% market share goal isn't crazy hyperbole.
- pier25 6y ago
  I don't have any numbers to share, it's just my anecdotal impression. I'm working on a platform for content creators (including blogging) so whenever I visit a blog I check the source code to see what they're using. It's not so often that I come up with a WP site to be honest, although I'm obviously biased in my interests. > Matt Mullenweg's 50% market share goal isn't crazy hyperbole. I agree, although it seems (again anecdotal impression) WP is a lot more common as a general purpose CMS.
  - davidivadavid 6y ago
    I follow hundreds of blogs through RSS. I'd say ~80+% run on WordPress, conservatively?
    - pier25 6y ago
      How many of those have been created in the past 2-3 years?
      - ksec 6y ago
        If your domain is Tech, those Medium and Substack may be popular. For rest of the world, and other Small Business, They use Wordpress. And has probably never heard of those solution before. The closest thing is Wix.com
yurishimo 6y ago
E-commerce is weird. I work for an agency that specializes in both Woo and Shopify and we've counseled certain clients to move to the other platform, depending on their business goals and requirements. Shopify is great for a simple business model with little hands on requirements and pushes towards low friction checkouts. Woo is less optimized to scale out of the box (this can be tweaked to scale easily enough), but you have entire stack available to you. It's just PHP and MySQL at the end of the day, so anything is possible. This allows you to build more custom experiences depending on what type of products you're selling. Think of a local t-shirt store. They might start on Shopify, selling their shirts for the local sports teams and tourist attractions, but as they grow, they move into selling custom branded clothes using a printer in their back office. They might transition to WordPress to build a more customized checkout flow, where a user can upload various design files (in a variety of formats: svg, ai, pdf, etc), tweak them on a model and then start a back and forth conversation with the shop owner if there are problems. All that can happen in their account and customizable. That sort of custom experience just isn't possible on Shopify without jumping through some absolutely ridiculous hoops (hosting a separate API and then running an SPA in your shopify theme, etc). All that to say, it depends :)
- pier25 6y ago
  Thanks for your input!

by pier25 6y ago

What's the average use case for WP these days? Shopify has probably eaten all the WP ecommerce sites. Blogging has probably moved to Medium, Substack, static sites, etc.

Giorgi 6y ago

What? woocommerce is viewed as next step from Shopify and Medium/Substack is basically graveyard at this point

pier25 6y ago
> woocommerce is viewed as next step from Shopify Is it? I honestly thought it was they other way around. > Medium/Substack is basically graveyard at this point This is definitely not true. Just look at how many Medium articles are shared to HN daily: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=medium.com&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

rchaud 6y ago

Plenty of use cases, especially if you want to maintain control over your digital presence instead of handing everything over to third parties. - Ecommerce store via WooCommerce - Online Course via Learndash LMS - Lead Generation/Capture via WPForms, or other plugins.

scarecrowbob 6y ago

We do a lot of customer-facing CMSs using it. We're rebuilding the Social Security Admin's customer-facing blog system... it's already WordPress, but we are building out additional functionality and creating a more accessible theme in addition to some other work. We have quite a few NGOs and large enterprises which we do that kind of work for.... it's a very popular and easy to use system for non-technical users who need to manage content.

AlchemistCamp 6y ago

> Blogging has probably moved to Medium, Substack, static sites, etc. Where are you getting this information? WP is an order of magnitude larger than all of them combined for blogging. Matt Mullenweg's 50% market share goal isn't crazy hyperbole.

pier25 6y ago
I don't have any numbers to share, it's just my anecdotal impression. I'm working on a platform for content creators (including blogging) so whenever I visit a blog I check the source code to see what they're using. It's not so often that I come up with a WP site to be honest, although I'm obviously biased in my interests. > Matt Mullenweg's 50% market share goal isn't crazy hyperbole. I agree, although it seems (again anecdotal impression) WP is a lot more common as a general purpose CMS.
- davidivadavid 6y ago
  I follow hundreds of blogs through RSS. I'd say ~80+% run on WordPress, conservatively?
  - pier25 6y ago
    How many of those have been created in the past 2-3 years?
    - ksec 6y ago
      If your domain is Tech, those Medium and Substack may be popular. For rest of the world, and other Small Business, They use Wordpress. And has probably never heard of those solution before. The closest thing is Wix.com

yurishimo 6y ago

E-commerce is weird. I work for an agency that specializes in both Woo and Shopify and we've counseled certain clients to move to the other platform, depending on their business goals and requirements. Shopify is great for a simple business model with little hands on requirements and pushes towards low friction checkouts. Woo is less optimized to scale out of the box (this can be tweaked to scale easily enough), but you have entire stack available to you. It's just PHP and MySQL at the end of the day, so anything is possible. This allows you to build more custom experiences depending on what type of products you're selling. Think of a local t-shirt store. They might start on Shopify, selling their shirts for the local sports teams and tourist attractions, but as they grow, they move into selling custom branded clothes using a printer in their back office. They might transition to WordPress to build a more customized checkout flow, where a user can upload various design files (in a variety of formats: svg, ai, pdf, etc), tweak them on a model and then start a back and forth conversation with the shop owner if there are problems. All that can happen in their account and customizable. That sort of custom experience just isn't possible on Shopify without jumping through some absolutely ridiculous hoops (hosting a separate API and then running an SPA in your shopify theme, etc). All that to say, it depends :)

pier25 6y ago
Thanks for your input!