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> Your average business owner wants to focus on the important thing: their content. They want to type in a box and push publish. End. They don’t care about how

> Your average business owner wants to focus on the important thing: their content. They want to type in a box and push publish. End. They don’t care about how crap (or not) the code is. They don’t care about performance too much. They do want to have the extensibility that is offered. They don’t want to get locked in (cough, Wix, Squarespace). That's IMO just a wrong understanding of the average business owner. Wordpress is much more useful to web agencies with the necessary skill set to heavily customise it than to the average Joe SMB Owner. To them, Wordpress is just as much a black box as Wix or Squarespace is, and all the web agencies using Wordpress to make websites for that demographic modify it so much with so many mutually exclusive plugin pipelines that getting their website from one to another often involves a complete rewrite anyway, if you want meaningful changes done. And for a long time, it was just the cost of doing business. But now? Nowadays, Squarespace et al. are probably a much better fit for them. Effectively the same vendor lock in if you're not a web agency yourself, but with much less overhead involved.

pembrook 5y ago
I agree with both you and OP. That’s why I’ve completely changed my position on who should be using what tech to build sites. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. I now recommend clients three options, based on the type of business: 1) If they’re a local small business (eg. Restaurant, flower shop) or solo creative business like a photographer or videographer, just do Squarespace. Wordpress is way too complex for their needs and they will easily shoot themselves in the foot. 2) If it’s a Saas company, tech startup, design agency, or enterprise, I strongly strongly recommend Webflow for their marketing site even though they think they want JAMstack. When the marketing team starts pulling dev time to redesign parts of the site every week, they immediately will regret the JAMstack decision. 3) if it’s a media/content business, always go Wordpress. Their employees will already be familiar with it, and the collaborative editing and SEO experience cannot be beat for publishing content on a daily basis. Combine this with plugins for newsletters and social integrations and the extra hassle of Wordpress is worth it for them.
- jaymzcampbell 5y ago
  We've recently switched out of Wordpress to Webflow and hit upon 3 snags that soured my opinion of it, though now we're "done" on it these are less of a big deal but I'd still probably have just stuck with WP with a reimagined and cleaned up theme/ACF for custom data: * Only one person can edit code at a time - this caused us to have to split who was doing what and we even ended up losing work when someone overwrote someone elses changes https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-39 https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-39 (this goes back to 2017) * Tracking changes in VCS easily (https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-381 https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-381) another from 2017, we tried out flowgater though in the end have just settled for exporting the code as is and then just committing it by hand. * A max limit of 10k characters (edit - as pointed out in comment, that's per file, I think IIRC we had all our JS in one single place which is how we hit this our side) in site code (https://forum.webflow.com/t/embed-html-10-000-characters/44399 https://forum.webflow.com/t/embed-html-10-000-characters/443...) - this caught us on doing some embedding, we worked around it in the end and not a massive deal but still felt a little annoying having to work around it.
  - pembrook 5y ago
    Webflow is definitely in need of more features (with their last funding round I bet you’ll see them soon). But even with those hiccups, you can just move so much faster inside Webflow to update or completely redesign a site than with Wordpress. For example, I work with a Saas company that has their designer throw together landing pages for competitor comparisons and integrations in like a day, and they change them weekly based on testing. You just can’t do that on Wordpress at that speed without making a mess with heavy plugins and bloat.
    - obedm 5y ago
      You can do that with wordpress plus a site builder. There are sure builders that are as good as Webflow, but without losing WP power
  - bsenftner 5y ago
okprod 5y ago
Agreed. I know a number of small business owners who prefer Squarespace for the ease of use and integration, and they've never thought about lock-in as a dealbreaker. I know some entrepreneurs and nonprofits who prefer WordPress for the FOSS and the ability to customize. A little while ago I set up a personal WP site for a family member and they got frustrated with having to install updates seemingly every time they logged in to the panel.
dabernathy89 5y ago
^ as a former WordPress developer, this is where I'm at. If anyone with a small budget wants a website for their small business or project, I would not suggest WordPress unless they are working with an agency they can afford who specializes in it. SquareSpace, Wix, SpaceCraft, etc are much easier to work with. Also agree re: lock-in. This is actually improving somewhat with Gutenberg, but transferring data from a WordPress site to another platform is still usually going to be a giant pain in the butt unless your content is extremely simple - no metadata, widgets, forms, custom blocks, etc.

pembrook 5y ago

I agree with both you and OP. That’s why I’ve completely changed my position on who should be using what tech to build sites. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. I now recommend clients three options, based on the type of business: 1) If they’re a local small business (eg. Restaurant, flower shop) or solo creative business like a photographer or videographer, just do Squarespace. Wordpress is way too complex for their needs and they will easily shoot themselves in the foot. 2) If it’s a Saas company, tech startup, design agency, or enterprise, I strongly strongly recommend Webflow for their marketing site even though they think they want JAMstack. When the marketing team starts pulling dev time to redesign parts of the site every week, they immediately will regret the JAMstack decision. 3) if it’s a media/content business, always go Wordpress. Their employees will already be familiar with it, and the collaborative editing and SEO experience cannot be beat for publishing content on a daily basis. Combine this with plugins for newsletters and social integrations and the extra hassle of Wordpress is worth it for them.

jaymzcampbell 5y ago
We've recently switched out of Wordpress to Webflow and hit upon 3 snags that soured my opinion of it, though now we're "done" on it these are less of a big deal but I'd still probably have just stuck with WP with a reimagined and cleaned up theme/ACF for custom data: * Only one person can edit code at a time - this caused us to have to split who was doing what and we even ended up losing work when someone overwrote someone elses changes https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-39 https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-39 (this goes back to 2017) * Tracking changes in VCS easily (https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-381 https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-381) another from 2017, we tried out flowgater though in the end have just settled for exporting the code as is and then just committing it by hand. * A max limit of 10k characters (edit - as pointed out in comment, that's per file, I think IIRC we had all our JS in one single place which is how we hit this our side) in site code (https://forum.webflow.com/t/embed-html-10-000-characters/44399 https://forum.webflow.com/t/embed-html-10-000-characters/443...) - this caught us on doing some embedding, we worked around it in the end and not a massive deal but still felt a little annoying having to work around it.
- pembrook 5y ago
  Webflow is definitely in need of more features (with their last funding round I bet you’ll see them soon). But even with those hiccups, you can just move so much faster inside Webflow to update or completely redesign a site than with Wordpress. For example, I work with a Saas company that has their designer throw together landing pages for competitor comparisons and integrations in like a day, and they change them weekly based on testing. You just can’t do that on Wordpress at that speed without making a mess with heavy plugins and bloat.
  - obedm 5y ago
    You can do that with wordpress plus a site builder. There are sure builders that are as good as Webflow, but without losing WP power
- bsenftner 5y ago

okprod 5y ago

Agreed. I know a number of small business owners who prefer Squarespace for the ease of use and integration, and they've never thought about lock-in as a dealbreaker. I know some entrepreneurs and nonprofits who prefer WordPress for the FOSS and the ability to customize. A little while ago I set up a personal WP site for a family member and they got frustrated with having to install updates seemingly every time they logged in to the panel.

dabernathy89 5y ago

^ as a former WordPress developer, this is where I'm at. If anyone with a small budget wants a website for their small business or project, I would not suggest WordPress unless they are working with an agency they can afford who specializes in it. SquareSpace, Wix, SpaceCraft, etc are much easier to work with. Also agree re: lock-in. This is actually improving somewhat with Gutenberg, but transferring data from a WordPress site to another platform is still usually going to be a giant pain in the butt unless your content is extremely simple - no metadata, widgets, forms, custom blocks, etc.