12 ms·

Wordpress market share keeps growing

118 points by mg 6y ago

asadkn 6y ago
This year could be mainly attributed to e-commerce growth. WordPress has WooCommerce as a plugin. Shopify too had impressive growth this year.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  I have a WooCommerce - based e-shop, it is a very nice system, and a cheap one. Compared to the costs of setting up even a modest grocery stand IRL, WooCommerce is extremely affordable. For a beginner, existence of WooCommerce means a significant reduction of barriers to enter the market.
  - mpol 6y ago
    I do like the user interface of WooCommerce, it fits quite nice into WordPress. What I don't like about WooCommerce is that they don't care about backwards-compatibility. WordPress Core is very much into backwards-compatibility, and I think plugins and themes should follow that idea. I do wish something better then WooCommerce would show up for WordPress. And another thing, that I personally don't have much of a stake in, a lot of WooCommerce addon plugins are of dubious quality. Following the Wordfence blog about security issues in plugins, there are often Woo plugins that have quite some big issues, like unauthenticated SQL attack or similar. As a hacker you don't even have to go to the trouble of multi-staging several security issues to get in, 1 of these is enough.
colesantiago 6y ago
I don't get how Gatsby, Github Pages are content management systems? Also, this looks like a bleak picture for the JAMStack if Wordpress keeps growing no?
- Pandabob 6y ago
  Not necessarily, at least JAMStack front-end frameworks like Next and Gatsby can co-exist with Wordpress because headless support from WP. That said, newer CMS's have their work cut out for them.
  - tluyben2 6y ago
    > Not necessarily, at least JAMStack front-end frameworks like Next and Gatsby can co-exist with Wordpress because headless support from WP. Sure, but no-one but very technical minded people would pick those instead of just WP. It's just extra complexity which you don't need when you start a blog or a shop or something like that. I would have a hard time defending it unless in very specific situations; wp is just too stable, too many plugins, too many programmers can support it, designers can make templates for it with ease etc, all hosters support it for next to nothing etc and without setup.
- cabraca 6y ago
  > Also, this looks like a bleak picture for the JAMStack if Wordpress keeps growing no? The JAMStack has a usability problem. That's why wordpress keeps growing. What do i need for wordpress? some cheap(maybe even free) webspace and a database. updates to the wordpress core are quite simple doable via webinterface. done. with this even the biggest simpleton can write blogposts. with a jam stack? headless cmses, blogposts written in markdown, config in "frontmatter", building and deploying your blog, versioning via git, not even a litte autocomplete. even i recommend wordpress because i have not the time and nerves to teach non-it people to use the JAMStack.
- capableweb 6y ago
  Not hard to make the connection between SCMs (like Git) and CMSs, one could even say SCM is a form of CMS, just a focus on code instead of general "content". Add a way to render content and serve it, and you have a CMS.
- 535188B17C93743 6y ago
  I think Jekyll is highly underrated. It's so liberating hosting a static site on GH and not paying a single cent for it.
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Galanwe 6y ago
Not a single source or methodology linked on the page means it's not even worth arguing about.
- bananatype 6y ago
  See here: * https://w3techs.com/technologies https://w3techs.com/technologies * https://w3techs.com/faq https://w3techs.com/faq
- gzer0 6y ago
  Edit: Not sure why this was deeply hidden within the website but here's what I could find: "When interpreting our surveys, you should know the following: We investigate technologies of websites, not of individual web pages. If we find a technology on any of the pages, it is considered to be used by the website. We include only the top 10 million websites (top 1 million before June 2013) in the statistics in order to limit the impact of domain spammers. We include all sites that are either in the Alexa top 10 million or in the Tranco top 1 million list. Website popularity rankings are sometimes considered inaccurate for measuring website traffic, but we find that they serve our purpose of providing a representative sample of established sites very well. We exclude sites that have no useful content, e.g. sites that only show the default web server page. We do not consider subdomains to be separate websites. For instance, sub1.example.com and sub2.example.com are considered to belong to the same site as example.com. That means for example, that all the subdomains of blogger.com, wordpress.com and similar sites are counted only as one website. We do not include redirected domains. For example, Sun.com redirects to Oracle.com, and is therefore not counted. Because our definition of "website" differs a bit from Alexa's and Tranco's definition, the "top 10 million" websites are actually not exactly 10 million. However, this has no statistical significance. Our reports are updated daily. Please be aware of the limitations indicated in our disclaimer."
zschuessler 6y ago
Seeing the Magento market share brought sweet nostalgia from the 2010s era. For a brief period of time it was all the rage in PHP commerce. It was seen as more professional than a WooCommerce setup (performance and bugs aside, I guess). Magento 2 released and it had a better aesthetic, but it was more of the same broken ideas no one wanted to work with. Why the team went with a fresh take on the old XML-based configuration is beyond me. Clients I worked with passed on Magento 2. Somewhere in here there is a lesson I can't articulate :-)
- tyingq 6y ago
  I think it's just that SAAS cart software finally offered enough customization capability.
- Tokkemon 6y ago
  We use Magento 2. Once you get over the fact that the XML system is batshit insane and start to work with it, it's not a horrible system to develop with.
indymike 6y ago
The graph towards the bottom of the page is interesting: It shows that WordPress has passed up raw HTML in 2020.
- capableweb 6y ago
  It doesn't. The green line is for "None", meaning the test couldn't figure out which CMS was used. Many platforms now hide which CMS is being used, not to mention custom JS applications built with React and other frameworks/libraries would end up under "None" as well. Which is different from "raw HTML". After all, everything the browser parses in the end is raw HTML, but this graph is about CMSs in particular.
  - indymike 6y ago
    Yes, that is how the survey works. None includes anything that can't be identified and raw html, too. That makes WordPress's achievement all the more impressive.
koboll 6y ago
The confounding factor here, I suspect, is the explosive growth in the sheer number of blogspam websites. Passive income coaches have been pumping out courses on affiliate link blogs for years now, so lots of people have dozens or hundreds of them, and that noise likely drowns out the signal of people putting more thought into choosing a framework for a site they actually care about.
- monkin 6y ago
  WordPress is a pain in the ass when doing that kind of thing now. It is way better to use HUGO/Jekyll generators with CI/CD and Netlify/Cloudflare. You can automate almost every portion of an affiliation website and forget about it. That's the ultimate goal of those websites, be self-sufficient and passive earners.
  - ibdf 6y ago
    The thing is... every shared hosting service has a one click WP install.
    - monkin 6y ago
      This doesn’t change anything in what I wrote. Even with one click install. :-)
  - tcgv 6y ago
    I use Jekyll + GitHub Pages for my personal tech blog. Posts are written in plain 'md' files that once pushed to the remote repo trigger the generation of final HTML pages. I love the simplicity, and that I don't have to worry about hosting. Not to mention that is completely free.
    - ihaveajob 6y ago
      Same reason why I set up my blog with Hugo + CloudFront. That, and to learn something new. It's neat to run your build-and-push command, and see everything deployed in a moment. Blazing fast, and you only pay for the DNS.
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urlwolf 6y ago
Did ghost.io not make a dent at all? it feels like aiming for the same market, with modern technology and faster pageloads. Not easy to install compared to php, that's for sure. This may be a blocker.
- monkin 6y ago
  The success of WordPress comes from outsourcing and business built around it. You will find thousands of companies that do only WordPress projects, deployments, customization, and support. Ghost has none of it.
  - traveler01 6y ago
    WordPress as other PHP frameworks have on advantage: Most hosting companies optimize their services for these things so it's cheaper and easier to deploy.
- ac29 6y ago
  Ghost looks like its competing with Substack and Medium. Wordpress covers a much broader market.
dorchadas 6y ago
I recently started a blog for a pet project of mine, via Wordpress, and I absolutely hate it. Their editor, Gutenberg, is the worst thing I've ever worked with. It's super laggy once the post even gets halfway long -- I'm talking multiple second delays in typing and it appearing on screen. It's so bad I've taken to editing my stuff in Pages/Word. Which leads to another issue that it doesn't keep the formatting when I try to copy-paste. It's just such a mess and it's almost given me to give up on this project or move away from Wordpress entirely. The editor is so God-awful I don't see how anyone can use it and like it.
- tyingq 6y ago
  I've had the same experience, but then I've had the same experience with every WYSIWYG html editor. Is there one that works reliably for you with copy-paste of arbitrary html?
  - dorchadas 6y ago
    I had more luck with Gutenberg if I first copy-pasted what I was working on into Google Docs, sadly. It kept the paragraph breaks and the bullets, though it did a second line of them in Wordpress's "list" block, but that was easily fixed. It's really annoying, as I like to keep it all in Pages since I'm working on a manuscript for a possible book, but if that's what I have to do I guess that's what I have to do. Sadly, I've not found any other way.
- mpol 6y ago
  You want to look into the Classic Editor, that was default up to WP 4.9: https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/ I despise the Gutenberg Editor, if only for reasons that it is not how people write. I don't want to interrupt my thinking by clicking to add blocks, I just want one big white sheet of virtual paper, to start writing untill the end.
  - dorchadas 6y ago
    Unfortunately, I'm using Wordpress.com, which only allows plugins if you pay. I haven't looked at porting over to wordpress.org, but perhaps I should. I do agree Gutenberg is absolutely awful. Why they ever thought it was a good idea, and why they keep doubling down on it, I'll never understand.
eznzt 6y ago
2020 just keeps getting worse.
mikesabbagh 6y ago
Wordpress community is a beast. The availability of so many themes and plugins is the main reason for wordpress' market share. I tried using Gatsby and Hugo, but if u want to add payment or shipping then you start feeling how limiting those tools are. U would find 1 or 2 solutions only if you are lucky. Otherwise, you have to write your own tool and spend time and money re-inventing the wheel. But definitely some like Gatsby and Next.js run much faster, as they pre-render the pages, so they have their niches. Try looking for a shipping plugin on wordpress, you will find different ones for different countries!! This explains why wordpress share is almost 40%. It is the community!
diveanon 6y ago
Shopify + webflow makes for a much saner e-commerce experience.
- rchaud 6y ago
  I'm curious, how much does Shopify + Webflow cost compared to say a single Squarespace Ecommerce tier subscription, which is currently $26/mo?
  - diveanon 6y ago
    It is more expensive, but as a developer / reseller it makes up for it with their partner programs. I make 5 figure monthly recurring revenue from shopify partnerships.
    - rchaud 6y ago
      Thanks for the explanation.
0xbadcafebee 6y ago
It's amazing how many people keep using this POS. It's just like Jenkins. Total POS, but literally everyone uses it. I suspect because the complexity of building a feature-parity replacement is so large that nobody really gets started on it, because it'd take probably 3 years to reach a point where it makes more sense to use the alternative. What's amazing as well is how the companies who churn out these techno-turds have no compunction about the design flaws of their tools. Oh, everything about using these things is an anti-pattern? But we're still making money right? People who promote static site generators do not understand why Wordpress is popular. Wordpress is like the anti-static-site-generator. People who use it don't care about automation or robustness or simplicity. They just don't want to deal with any technical bullshit. Just let me point and click on things.
- deleted 6y ago
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- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  After several years now using Drone and bazel for managing CI/CD, I would take Jenkins in a heart beat. Jenkins is sooo much better than Drone, it almost makes me cry.
- prevthrash 6y ago
  Which anti-patterns are you thinking of? And what at are better alternatives in your opinion? Drupal seems like an interesting open source alternative, albeit with a much smaller community.
- egypturnash 6y ago
  I mean, shit, I spent several months building my custom templates for Wordpress years ago, and I haven’t really had to do anything with it since. It works. I go off and make the art and comics it’s there to hold, and I spend a few minutes in WP posting it. And WP autoposts about my posts to the social media sites that have completely replaced RSS. The last goddamn thing I want to do is be on the bleeding edge of some bullshit that I have to be constantly hacking on. It may be a giant mess under the hood, but my experience is one of automation, robustness, and simplicity. It just keeps on trucking along with no more thought on my part than “oh it wants to update, okay let’s hit that update button on the core and plugins” every so often.
prevthrash 6y ago
Drupal has been on a decline the past two years from 2.3% to 1.5% according to those trends. Likewise, the last post here on HN has been 4 years ago as well. It seems to stagnate right now. Though I assume the community didn't really shrink, just didn't grow in size relative to market adapting Wordpress. What would you consider the best open source CMS alternative to Wordpress?
isodev 6y ago
I love WordPress. Takes 5 minutes to setup on a VPS and it has so many themes and plugins. Also PHP makes it easy to quickly fiddle with pages without too much “tooling distractions”.
tmikaeld 6y ago
No, it isn't, it's marketing spam and automated. The sites stay around for a year on cheap domains and re-appear in a new suit the year after. This will continue as long as search engines continue to favor Wordpress.
- partiallypro 6y ago
  Yes, it actually is. Web agencies throughout the world build and launch thousands (likely more) of sites a day in Wordpress. They are all legitimate businesses that once had other CMSs or just never had a web presence.
- syntheticnature 6y ago
  It looks like they try to compensate for that, per their FAQ page: > For the surveys, we count the top 10 million websites according to Alexa and Tranco, see our technology overview for more explanations. We do crawl more sites, but we use the top 10 million to select a representative sample of established sites. We found that including more sites in the sample (e.g. all the sites we know) may easily lead to a bias towards technologies typically used for "throw-away" sites or parked sites or other types of spam domains.
  - tmikaeld 6y ago
    There are content-writing AI's which you almost cannot tell is not written by a human, I would be surprised if an automated crawler would be able to tell the difference when humans barely can. I've even seen agencies use these tools regularly, which makes it possible to spew out several sites per day.
    - syntheticnature 6y ago
      And how does that get them into the top sites per Alexa and Tranco, per the part I quoted?
      - tmikaeld 6y ago
feralimal 6y ago
I'd love to hear about self-hosted alternatives, especially ones where you can have a comments section. There are plugins in Wordpress that do comments (not brilliantly), but alternatives seem quite complex. It would be great to be able to interact with whoever reads your content..
- NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
  You could consider reviewing how others do it. There's a reason why less and less want to host their comments and outsource that instead. Comment = write access to your site. You don't want that. There are multi-million dollar spam farms dedicating hundreds of developers to finding ways to spam and abuse comments. Every single WP, Drupal and Joomla website that I know that was not properly maintained or hosted with a major provider (such as WP@WP themselves) got hacked at some point.
  - feralimal 6y ago
    Thanks for your comment. Right - but I really do want comments. This site and many many others have write access and manage. If a self-hosted solution ever caused me issues on account of spam etc, I'd review the situation.
    - NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
      With outsourcing comments someone else handles (some of) the back-end, facilitating appearance of comments on your site but limiting your own back-end exposure. One solution under active discussion is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268
fareesh 6y ago
I've built a couple of WordPress websites (under protest). My general approach is to use "Advanced Custom Fields" and a relatively barebones installation with a custom theme built from scratch. It turns into something of a simple CRUD web application thereafter which covers the vast majority of simple websites. For eCommerce, I install WooCommerce. Here is why it happened: 1) (~2014) Company A is a Fortune 500 company with a large presence in my country. We designed some concepts for their product websites, which they really liked. When it came to implementation, they gave us a list of acceptable CMS technology. They'd be deploying to some kind of Plesk infrastructure and they were only allowed to use a handful of the frameworks supported by Plesk. Of the ones included, WordPress was probably one of the better choices. I tried to convince them to let us go with something simple instead of a full-fledged WordPress installation. They said their internal security policy prevented them from allowing this, and that their team was only familiar with doing pentesting, audits, etc. for known entities like WordPress. So we built the website and handed it over to their security team. We got paid and they deployed the website and I forgot all about it. Funnily enough, their server was breached a few years later. When they were doing an investigation they contacted me, and I shared the emails about pentesting, audits, security, etc. They were a little embarassed. Nonetheless, they're still frequent customers. Unfortunately they still insist on WordPress. We built maybe 6 product websites for them. 2) (~2015) Company B is a small brick and mortar business. Their developer built them a WordPress website but disappeared on them. I ended up deleting a large amount of bloat and plugins and writing them via simpler controller actions via a theme building framework. 3) (~2019) Company C is a ~$5bn private company with a global presence. Similar situation as Company A. The internal team insisted on either Wix or WordPress. The Ops/Marketing guys say nobody understands technology so they have to do what the IT folks say. I've also spoken to at least 100 potential customers who all had the same story (similar to #2). They were non-technical people who wanted to build a website for their product/service. Their budget wasn't great. They gave all their money to a freelance developer. Developer wasn't really a developer - he just knew how to install a specific combination of WordPress plugins and set them up to get the outcome that they wanted. They wanted to customize it beyond what the plugin allowed, the developer said it wasn't possible and started asking for their money. Relationship soured and they parted ways. In all of those cases they spoke to me and ended up going to market with what they have. Maybe 1 or 2 of them ended up with a successful product/service and came back someday for a rebuild. WordPress is absolutely terrible but sadly it is not going anywhere.
shergill 6y ago
what do people recommend for hosting a simple wordpress blog? Using the paid plans for wordpress.com is quite expensive
NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
Wordpress is a fascinating example of worse-is-better in market-facing technology. I was working with Wordpress early on and finally fired my last client 2 years ago. What many inexperienced clients expect from technology is a miracle, a magic pill, and if they get an experience that is "easier" and "intuitive", they will ignore all other issues. It got uneasy quick enough for them. I always found it hilarious, when I still had a consulting gig, when clients would cancel their yearly service and upkeep subscription because "we can do everything with plug-ins, and my kid/ friend/ junior assistant can do Wordpress" only to come back with a last-minute "save us" fix request because their install was hacked due to disabled automatic updates, crappy plug-ins (the new "wordpress expert" could not review plug-in quality). And whatever they do, they always start changing the theme and colors when they take over. Because everyone is an expert on what they can see. Oh boy, does choice of font and headings formatting matter! Why waste budget on back-ups, static world-facing pages, hardening the admin, let alone implementing testing and statistics to identify customer needs and interest, etc. People are fascinating - today, most of them have lost data when a phone or computer crashed. They know about back-ups from past painful experience. But if you look at statistics for themes vs back-up implementations and downloads, It's the presentation that matters most. They can't tell you why. It hurts them to articulate why! If you look at logs for any world-facing website, you will see multiple scans for Wordpress vulnerabilities. If you review WP security history, it includes astounding penetration of core architecture. They decide Emojis are a core system feature? Not preventing user enumeration or XSS? Emojis get hacked. Tweaking theme colors is ever so important? Core Wordpress color tweaking gets hacked. JSON REST API is important turned on out of the box for some reasion? That gets hacked. Long history of bad decisions that should have not been enabled by default. Wordpress right is not easy. But it gives the inexperienced customers more of what they think they want, out of the box, than any other CMS system. There's a lesson there. For me as a consultant, it was: either outsource a large part of my business to someone very cheap and work as a reseller if I want to stay in Wordpress, or raise my customer quality. It is unfair to blame the customer, we are not any closer to core scientific principles in computer education than when we started. Information science should be core of the school curriculum, and we should have the same open scientific standards in our digital literacy courses that we have in physics or biology. It would be great if people could understand the difference between information and presentation, for starters. It was impossible to point out to my customers that Craigslist was successful without any styling because they were delivering value to their customers. Most thought a good website "looked good, you know, like Apple".
kabes 6y ago
I often use wordpress purely as an admin and make the frontend using the rest api. Together with advanced custom fields pro it is unbeatable in terms of speed of development for anything that isn't performance critical.
ourcat 6y ago
Pangs of nostalgia seeing PHP-Nuke down there at the bottom. The first paid freelance website 'CMS' I built for a company back in the early-mid 90s was based on a heavily modified version of 'WWW-Board' from Matt's Script Archive. Those were the days :)
KingOfCoders 6y ago
I'm so happy after a d case if WordPress switching all sites to static generators.

118 points by mg 6y ago

This year could be mainly attributed to e-commerce growth. WordPress has WooCommerce as a plugin. Shopify too had impressive growth this year.

inglor_cz 6y ago
I have a WooCommerce - based e-shop, it is a very nice system, and a cheap one. Compared to the costs of setting up even a modest grocery stand IRL, WooCommerce is extremely affordable. For a beginner, existence of WooCommerce means a significant reduction of barriers to enter the market.
- mpol 6y ago
  I do like the user interface of WooCommerce, it fits quite nice into WordPress. What I don't like about WooCommerce is that they don't care about backwards-compatibility. WordPress Core is very much into backwards-compatibility, and I think plugins and themes should follow that idea. I do wish something better then WooCommerce would show up for WordPress. And another thing, that I personally don't have much of a stake in, a lot of WooCommerce addon plugins are of dubious quality. Following the Wordfence blog about security issues in plugins, there are often Woo plugins that have quite some big issues, like unauthenticated SQL attack or similar. As a hacker you don't even have to go to the trouble of multi-staging several security issues to get in, 1 of these is enough.

colesantiago 6y ago

I don't get how Gatsby, Github Pages are content management systems? Also, this looks like a bleak picture for the JAMStack if Wordpress keeps growing no?

Pandabob 6y ago
Not necessarily, at least JAMStack front-end frameworks like Next and Gatsby can co-exist with Wordpress because headless support from WP. That said, newer CMS's have their work cut out for them.
- tluyben2 6y ago
  > Not necessarily, at least JAMStack front-end frameworks like Next and Gatsby can co-exist with Wordpress because headless support from WP. Sure, but no-one but very technical minded people would pick those instead of just WP. It's just extra complexity which you don't need when you start a blog or a shop or something like that. I would have a hard time defending it unless in very specific situations; wp is just too stable, too many plugins, too many programmers can support it, designers can make templates for it with ease etc, all hosters support it for next to nothing etc and without setup.
cabraca 6y ago
> Also, this looks like a bleak picture for the JAMStack if Wordpress keeps growing no? The JAMStack has a usability problem. That's why wordpress keeps growing. What do i need for wordpress? some cheap(maybe even free) webspace and a database. updates to the wordpress core are quite simple doable via webinterface. done. with this even the biggest simpleton can write blogposts. with a jam stack? headless cmses, blogposts written in markdown, config in "frontmatter", building and deploying your blog, versioning via git, not even a litte autocomplete. even i recommend wordpress because i have not the time and nerves to teach non-it people to use the JAMStack.
capableweb 6y ago
Not hard to make the connection between SCMs (like Git) and CMSs, one could even say SCM is a form of CMS, just a focus on code instead of general "content". Add a way to render content and serve it, and you have a CMS.
535188B17C93743 6y ago
I think Jekyll is highly underrated. It's so liberating hosting a static site on GH and not paying a single cent for it.

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Galanwe 6y ago

Not a single source or methodology linked on the page means it's not even worth arguing about.

bananatype 6y ago
See here: * https://w3techs.com/technologies https://w3techs.com/technologies * https://w3techs.com/faq https://w3techs.com/faq
gzer0 6y ago
Edit: Not sure why this was deeply hidden within the website but here's what I could find: "When interpreting our surveys, you should know the following: We investigate technologies of websites, not of individual web pages. If we find a technology on any of the pages, it is considered to be used by the website. We include only the top 10 million websites (top 1 million before June 2013) in the statistics in order to limit the impact of domain spammers. We include all sites that are either in the Alexa top 10 million or in the Tranco top 1 million list. Website popularity rankings are sometimes considered inaccurate for measuring website traffic, but we find that they serve our purpose of providing a representative sample of established sites very well. We exclude sites that have no useful content, e.g. sites that only show the default web server page. We do not consider subdomains to be separate websites. For instance, sub1.example.com and sub2.example.com are considered to belong to the same site as example.com. That means for example, that all the subdomains of blogger.com, wordpress.com and similar sites are counted only as one website. We do not include redirected domains. For example, Sun.com redirects to Oracle.com, and is therefore not counted. Because our definition of "website" differs a bit from Alexa's and Tranco's definition, the "top 10 million" websites are actually not exactly 10 million. However, this has no statistical significance. Our reports are updated daily. Please be aware of the limitations indicated in our disclaimer."

zschuessler 6y ago

Seeing the Magento market share brought sweet nostalgia from the 2010s era. For a brief period of time it was all the rage in PHP commerce. It was seen as more professional than a WooCommerce setup (performance and bugs aside, I guess). Magento 2 released and it had a better aesthetic, but it was more of the same broken ideas no one wanted to work with. Why the team went with a fresh take on the old XML-based configuration is beyond me. Clients I worked with passed on Magento 2. Somewhere in here there is a lesson I can't articulate :-)

tyingq 6y ago
I think it's just that SAAS cart software finally offered enough customization capability.
Tokkemon 6y ago
We use Magento 2. Once you get over the fact that the XML system is batshit insane and start to work with it, it's not a horrible system to develop with.

indymike 6y ago

The graph towards the bottom of the page is interesting: It shows that WordPress has passed up raw HTML in 2020.

capableweb 6y ago
It doesn't. The green line is for "None", meaning the test couldn't figure out which CMS was used. Many platforms now hide which CMS is being used, not to mention custom JS applications built with React and other frameworks/libraries would end up under "None" as well. Which is different from "raw HTML". After all, everything the browser parses in the end is raw HTML, but this graph is about CMSs in particular.
- indymike 6y ago
  Yes, that is how the survey works. None includes anything that can't be identified and raw html, too. That makes WordPress's achievement all the more impressive.

koboll 6y ago

The confounding factor here, I suspect, is the explosive growth in the sheer number of blogspam websites. Passive income coaches have been pumping out courses on affiliate link blogs for years now, so lots of people have dozens or hundreds of them, and that noise likely drowns out the signal of people putting more thought into choosing a framework for a site they actually care about.

monkin 6y ago
WordPress is a pain in the ass when doing that kind of thing now. It is way better to use HUGO/Jekyll generators with CI/CD and Netlify/Cloudflare. You can automate almost every portion of an affiliation website and forget about it. That's the ultimate goal of those websites, be self-sufficient and passive earners.
- ibdf 6y ago
  The thing is... every shared hosting service has a one click WP install.
  - monkin 6y ago
    This doesn’t change anything in what I wrote. Even with one click install. :-)
- tcgv 6y ago
  I use Jekyll + GitHub Pages for my personal tech blog. Posts are written in plain 'md' files that once pushed to the remote repo trigger the generation of final HTML pages. I love the simplicity, and that I don't have to worry about hosting. Not to mention that is completely free.
  - ihaveajob 6y ago
    Same reason why I set up my blog with Hugo + CloudFront. That, and to learn something new. It's neat to run your build-and-push command, and see everything deployed in a moment. Blazing fast, and you only pay for the DNS.

deleted 6y ago

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urlwolf 6y ago

Did ghost.io not make a dent at all? it feels like aiming for the same market, with modern technology and faster pageloads. Not easy to install compared to php, that's for sure. This may be a blocker.

monkin 6y ago
The success of WordPress comes from outsourcing and business built around it. You will find thousands of companies that do only WordPress projects, deployments, customization, and support. Ghost has none of it.
- traveler01 6y ago
  WordPress as other PHP frameworks have on advantage: Most hosting companies optimize their services for these things so it's cheaper and easier to deploy.
ac29 6y ago
Ghost looks like its competing with Substack and Medium. Wordpress covers a much broader market.

dorchadas 6y ago

I recently started a blog for a pet project of mine, via Wordpress, and I absolutely hate it. Their editor, Gutenberg, is the worst thing I've ever worked with. It's super laggy once the post even gets halfway long -- I'm talking multiple second delays in typing and it appearing on screen. It's so bad I've taken to editing my stuff in Pages/Word. Which leads to another issue that it doesn't keep the formatting when I try to copy-paste. It's just such a mess and it's almost given me to give up on this project or move away from Wordpress entirely. The editor is so God-awful I don't see how anyone can use it and like it.

tyingq 6y ago
I've had the same experience, but then I've had the same experience with every WYSIWYG html editor. Is there one that works reliably for you with copy-paste of arbitrary html?
- dorchadas 6y ago
  I had more luck with Gutenberg if I first copy-pasted what I was working on into Google Docs, sadly. It kept the paragraph breaks and the bullets, though it did a second line of them in Wordpress's "list" block, but that was easily fixed. It's really annoying, as I like to keep it all in Pages since I'm working on a manuscript for a possible book, but if that's what I have to do I guess that's what I have to do. Sadly, I've not found any other way.
mpol 6y ago
You want to look into the Classic Editor, that was default up to WP 4.9: https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/ I despise the Gutenberg Editor, if only for reasons that it is not how people write. I don't want to interrupt my thinking by clicking to add blocks, I just want one big white sheet of virtual paper, to start writing untill the end.
- dorchadas 6y ago
  Unfortunately, I'm using Wordpress.com, which only allows plugins if you pay. I haven't looked at porting over to wordpress.org, but perhaps I should. I do agree Gutenberg is absolutely awful. Why they ever thought it was a good idea, and why they keep doubling down on it, I'll never understand.

eznzt 6y ago

2020 just keeps getting worse.

mikesabbagh 6y ago

Wordpress community is a beast. The availability of so many themes and plugins is the main reason for wordpress' market share. I tried using Gatsby and Hugo, but if u want to add payment or shipping then you start feeling how limiting those tools are. U would find 1 or 2 solutions only if you are lucky. Otherwise, you have to write your own tool and spend time and money re-inventing the wheel. But definitely some like Gatsby and Next.js run much faster, as they pre-render the pages, so they have their niches. Try looking for a shipping plugin on wordpress, you will find different ones for different countries!! This explains why wordpress share is almost 40%. It is the community!

diveanon 6y ago

Shopify + webflow makes for a much saner e-commerce experience.

rchaud 6y ago
I'm curious, how much does Shopify + Webflow cost compared to say a single Squarespace Ecommerce tier subscription, which is currently $26/mo?
- diveanon 6y ago
  It is more expensive, but as a developer / reseller it makes up for it with their partner programs. I make 5 figure monthly recurring revenue from shopify partnerships.
  - rchaud 6y ago
    Thanks for the explanation.

0xbadcafebee 6y ago

It's amazing how many people keep using this POS. It's just like Jenkins. Total POS, but literally everyone uses it. I suspect because the complexity of building a feature-parity replacement is so large that nobody really gets started on it, because it'd take probably 3 years to reach a point where it makes more sense to use the alternative. What's amazing as well is how the companies who churn out these techno-turds have no compunction about the design flaws of their tools. Oh, everything about using these things is an anti-pattern? But we're still making money right? People who promote static site generators do not understand why Wordpress is popular. Wordpress is like the anti-static-site-generator. People who use it don't care about automation or robustness or simplicity. They just don't want to deal with any technical bullshit. Just let me point and click on things.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
After several years now using Drone and bazel for managing CI/CD, I would take Jenkins in a heart beat. Jenkins is sooo much better than Drone, it almost makes me cry.
prevthrash 6y ago
Which anti-patterns are you thinking of? And what at are better alternatives in your opinion? Drupal seems like an interesting open source alternative, albeit with a much smaller community.
egypturnash 6y ago
I mean, shit, I spent several months building my custom templates for Wordpress years ago, and I haven’t really had to do anything with it since. It works. I go off and make the art and comics it’s there to hold, and I spend a few minutes in WP posting it. And WP autoposts about my posts to the social media sites that have completely replaced RSS. The last goddamn thing I want to do is be on the bleeding edge of some bullshit that I have to be constantly hacking on. It may be a giant mess under the hood, but my experience is one of automation, robustness, and simplicity. It just keeps on trucking along with no more thought on my part than “oh it wants to update, okay let’s hit that update button on the core and plugins” every so often.

prevthrash 6y ago

Drupal has been on a decline the past two years from 2.3% to 1.5% according to those trends. Likewise, the last post here on HN has been 4 years ago as well. It seems to stagnate right now. Though I assume the community didn't really shrink, just didn't grow in size relative to market adapting Wordpress. What would you consider the best open source CMS alternative to Wordpress?

isodev 6y ago

I love WordPress. Takes 5 minutes to setup on a VPS and it has so many themes and plugins. Also PHP makes it easy to quickly fiddle with pages without too much “tooling distractions”.

tmikaeld 6y ago

No, it isn't, it's marketing spam and automated. The sites stay around for a year on cheap domains and re-appear in a new suit the year after. This will continue as long as search engines continue to favor Wordpress.

partiallypro 6y ago
Yes, it actually is. Web agencies throughout the world build and launch thousands (likely more) of sites a day in Wordpress. They are all legitimate businesses that once had other CMSs or just never had a web presence.
syntheticnature 6y ago
It looks like they try to compensate for that, per their FAQ page: > For the surveys, we count the top 10 million websites according to Alexa and Tranco, see our technology overview for more explanations. We do crawl more sites, but we use the top 10 million to select a representative sample of established sites. We found that including more sites in the sample (e.g. all the sites we know) may easily lead to a bias towards technologies typically used for "throw-away" sites or parked sites or other types of spam domains.
- tmikaeld 6y ago
  There are content-writing AI's which you almost cannot tell is not written by a human, I would be surprised if an automated crawler would be able to tell the difference when humans barely can. I've even seen agencies use these tools regularly, which makes it possible to spew out several sites per day.
  - syntheticnature 6y ago
    And how does that get them into the top sites per Alexa and Tranco, per the part I quoted?
    - tmikaeld 6y ago

feralimal 6y ago

I'd love to hear about self-hosted alternatives, especially ones where you can have a comments section. There are plugins in Wordpress that do comments (not brilliantly), but alternatives seem quite complex. It would be great to be able to interact with whoever reads your content..

NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
You could consider reviewing how others do it. There's a reason why less and less want to host their comments and outsource that instead. Comment = write access to your site. You don't want that. There are multi-million dollar spam farms dedicating hundreds of developers to finding ways to spam and abuse comments. Every single WP, Drupal and Joomla website that I know that was not properly maintained or hosted with a major provider (such as WP@WP themselves) got hacked at some point.
- feralimal 6y ago
  Thanks for your comment. Right - but I really do want comments. This site and many many others have write access and manage. If a self-hosted solution ever caused me issues on account of spam etc, I'd review the situation.
  - NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
    With outsourcing comments someone else handles (some of) the back-end, facilitating appearance of comments on your site but limiting your own back-end exposure. One solution under active discussion is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268

fareesh 6y ago

I've built a couple of WordPress websites (under protest). My general approach is to use "Advanced Custom Fields" and a relatively barebones installation with a custom theme built from scratch. It turns into something of a simple CRUD web application thereafter which covers the vast majority of simple websites. For eCommerce, I install WooCommerce. Here is why it happened: 1) (~2014) Company A is a Fortune 500 company with a large presence in my country. We designed some concepts for their product websites, which they really liked. When it came to implementation, they gave us a list of acceptable CMS technology. They'd be deploying to some kind of Plesk infrastructure and they were only allowed to use a handful of the frameworks supported by Plesk. Of the ones included, WordPress was probably one of the better choices. I tried to convince them to let us go with something simple instead of a full-fledged WordPress installation. They said their internal security policy prevented them from allowing this, and that their team was only familiar with doing pentesting, audits, etc. for known entities like WordPress. So we built the website and handed it over to their security team. We got paid and they deployed the website and I forgot all about it. Funnily enough, their server was breached a few years later. When they were doing an investigation they contacted me, and I shared the emails about pentesting, audits, security, etc. They were a little embarassed. Nonetheless, they're still frequent customers. Unfortunately they still insist on WordPress. We built maybe 6 product websites for them. 2) (~2015) Company B is a small brick and mortar business. Their developer built them a WordPress website but disappeared on them. I ended up deleting a large amount of bloat and plugins and writing them via simpler controller actions via a theme building framework. 3) (~2019) Company C is a ~$5bn private company with a global presence. Similar situation as Company A. The internal team insisted on either Wix or WordPress. The Ops/Marketing guys say nobody understands technology so they have to do what the IT folks say. I've also spoken to at least 100 potential customers who all had the same story (similar to #2). They were non-technical people who wanted to build a website for their product/service. Their budget wasn't great. They gave all their money to a freelance developer. Developer wasn't really a developer - he just knew how to install a specific combination of WordPress plugins and set them up to get the outcome that they wanted. They wanted to customize it beyond what the plugin allowed, the developer said it wasn't possible and started asking for their money. Relationship soured and they parted ways. In all of those cases they spoke to me and ended up going to market with what they have. Maybe 1 or 2 of them ended up with a successful product/service and came back someday for a rebuild. WordPress is absolutely terrible but sadly it is not going anywhere.

shergill 6y ago

what do people recommend for hosting a simple wordpress blog? Using the paid plans for wordpress.com is quite expensive

NotPavlovsDog 6y ago

Wordpress is a fascinating example of worse-is-better in market-facing technology. I was working with Wordpress early on and finally fired my last client 2 years ago. What many inexperienced clients expect from technology is a miracle, a magic pill, and if they get an experience that is "easier" and "intuitive", they will ignore all other issues. It got uneasy quick enough for them. I always found it hilarious, when I still had a consulting gig, when clients would cancel their yearly service and upkeep subscription because "we can do everything with plug-ins, and my kid/ friend/ junior assistant can do Wordpress" only to come back with a last-minute "save us" fix request because their install was hacked due to disabled automatic updates, crappy plug-ins (the new "wordpress expert" could not review plug-in quality). And whatever they do, they always start changing the theme and colors when they take over. Because everyone is an expert on what they can see. Oh boy, does choice of font and headings formatting matter! Why waste budget on back-ups, static world-facing pages, hardening the admin, let alone implementing testing and statistics to identify customer needs and interest, etc. People are fascinating - today, most of them have lost data when a phone or computer crashed. They know about back-ups from past painful experience. But if you look at statistics for themes vs back-up implementations and downloads, It's the presentation that matters most. They can't tell you why. It hurts them to articulate why! If you look at logs for any world-facing website, you will see multiple scans for Wordpress vulnerabilities. If you review WP security history, it includes astounding penetration of core architecture. They decide Emojis are a core system feature? Not preventing user enumeration or XSS? Emojis get hacked. Tweaking theme colors is ever so important? Core Wordpress color tweaking gets hacked. JSON REST API is important turned on out of the box for some reasion? That gets hacked. Long history of bad decisions that should have not been enabled by default. Wordpress right is not easy. But it gives the inexperienced customers more of what they think they want, out of the box, than any other CMS system. There's a lesson there. For me as a consultant, it was: either outsource a large part of my business to someone very cheap and work as a reseller if I want to stay in Wordpress, or raise my customer quality. It is unfair to blame the customer, we are not any closer to core scientific principles in computer education than when we started. Information science should be core of the school curriculum, and we should have the same open scientific standards in our digital literacy courses that we have in physics or biology. It would be great if people could understand the difference between information and presentation, for starters. It was impossible to point out to my customers that Craigslist was successful without any styling because they were delivering value to their customers. Most thought a good website "looked good, you know, like Apple".

kabes 6y ago

I often use wordpress purely as an admin and make the frontend using the rest api. Together with advanced custom fields pro it is unbeatable in terms of speed of development for anything that isn't performance critical.

ourcat 6y ago

Pangs of nostalgia seeing PHP-Nuke down there at the bottom. The first paid freelance website 'CMS' I built for a company back in the early-mid 90s was based on a heavily modified version of 'WWW-Board' from Matt's Script Archive. Those were the days :)

KingOfCoders 6y ago

I'm so happy after a d case if WordPress switching all sites to static generators.