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In fairness to Matt and Automattic, Wordpress pre-Gutenberg was basically unusable by non-technical users. I’ve seen research that the successful completion ra

In fairness to Matt and Automattic, Wordpress pre-Gutenberg was basically unusable by non-technical users. I’ve seen research that the successful completion rate for regular users with Wordpress on a bunch of core UX elements is close to zero. It’s fine if Automattic wants to say that Wordpress is just for web developers and HN readers, but I think they really want to build the website platform for everyone, and that’s not happening with Wordpress without things like a real page builder. (Full disclosure, I used to work at Squarespace and will freely say that the squarespace page builder at the time I was there was not great, but it was usable by regular people)

dazc 5y ago
For a CMS that was 'unusable by non-technical users' the adoption rate was mighty impressive? 'Catering for everyone' is an ego-trip that's resulted in page bloat for everyone whether they wanted it or not.
- mattzito 5y ago
  It depends on the lens through which you want to view the addressable market for adoption. For sure, Wordpress has deservedly captured a huge part of the current market for CMS-powered websites. It's very powerful, it's performant, it's got an ecosystem of plugins and templates to expand its capabilities, and a huge network of developers and designers who are familiar with it. But if you want to view the market as "getting everyone on the open web who needs a presence", it's hard to see how Wordpress the product is meeting that need. ~1/3 of US businesses have no owned/managed Internet presence at all (and the number is even lower outside of the US). Of the ones who do, something like 15% of them (iirc) are only on Facebook and/or Instagram, and that number is growing. Let's take that small business owner who doesn't yet have an online presence and give them a default Wordpress install, and then let's give them a Facebook business page creator - which one do you think they'll be more successful at completing? Or if I need a simple blog/newsletter - let's try Wordpress vs. Substack or Wordpress vs. Medium - which is going to be easier? If you say that's not the target market for Wordpress, that's fine, but every interview with Matt Mullenwig gives me the impression HE thinks that's the target market for Wordpress/Automattic - everyone who needs an online presence. By limiting Wordpress to only technical users and/or websites that are built by pros, it's basically ceding swaths of the user population to these purely commercial platforms that are open to varying degrees.
  - dazc 5y ago
    Fair argument although wasn't this the idea behind the .org/.com which was a kind of a best of both worlds solution that seemed to work OK up until now?
coldtea 5y ago
>In fairness to Matt and Automattic, Wordpress pre-Gutenberg was basically unusable by non-technical users. While I'm pro-Gutenberg (see my answer above), the WP editor pre-Gutenberg was absolutely fine for "non-technical users" too. It's adoption, for regular users like plain blog authors and journalists and so on, had already been massive (in the "tens or even hundreds of millions userbase" level massive...
- mattzito 5y ago
  Yeah, in an attempt to be concise, some nuance was lost - I think Wordpress as a pure editor, as a real CMS, when set up properly and/or using an OOTB template is perfectly fine. The post editor is good, you have all the basic formatting elements, page types, etc. But I think that limits you to two universes of setups - either built by a "pro" (for some definition of pro) who configures everything, installs plugins, installs and customizes the templates and basically gets everything perfect OR very basic cookie-cutter installs with lots of limitations. Either of those scenarios is fine, and I think it's great to have an ecosystem of small designers whose customers are DIFM users. I agree for "blog authors" and writers it's also fine, subject to the above limitations. The reality, though, is that market is tiny - "tens or hundreds of millions of users" - I do not think there are in the hundreds of millions of blog authors getting active traffic, though I maybe buy "10s of millions". Tumblr alone has 500+m active sites, even if we assume only 10% get actual consistent traffic (which would be roughly consistent with the data I remember), that alone is 50m active sites. If there are 10s of millions of bloggers, we would expect that the active # of sites are in the single-digit millions.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    It's hasn't been just bloggers since forever. All kinds of sites, news, business, restaurants, community, ngo, all the way to the White House, use WordPress.
hammyhavoc 5y ago
Unusable by non-technical users? Lol. Then explain how everybody from kids to grandmas started blogs and ecommerce sites built on top of WordPress pre-Gutenberg.
- mattzito 5y ago
  I missed this earlier - as always, it’s hard to convey nuance in a HN comment, so of course there are non-technical people who are successful at building Wordpress sites. I’m not a mechanic, but I can fix things on my car, because I’m reasonably handy and can read instructions and compare diagrams and I know when I’m over my head. I think the analogy holds up for Wordpress too - there are non-technical people who can figure it out, and that’s great. But I would argue they are a small population relative to the total addressable market of people who need websites. Put another way - what data do we have that shows that “everybody from kids to grandmas” started sites on Wordpress? And to get more specific, how many of those users either had help getting it set up, or used a template and made zero changes to it, or had a hosting provider build a site for them using a builder atop Wordpress? Because the data I’ve seen suggests that users really struggle with any customization of a Wordpress site, and I think the adoption of Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy’s website central, etc. shows that there is a real gap there for Wordpress.
  - hammyhavoc 5y ago
    The data I have is who I've had as clients for other services throughout the past decade. Clearly a trend in the UK and USA, and almost all of them figure it out on their own from the extensive documentation and YouTube videos available.

dazc 5y ago

For a CMS that was 'unusable by non-technical users' the adoption rate was mighty impressive? 'Catering for everyone' is an ego-trip that's resulted in page bloat for everyone whether they wanted it or not.

mattzito 5y ago
It depends on the lens through which you want to view the addressable market for adoption. For sure, Wordpress has deservedly captured a huge part of the current market for CMS-powered websites. It's very powerful, it's performant, it's got an ecosystem of plugins and templates to expand its capabilities, and a huge network of developers and designers who are familiar with it. But if you want to view the market as "getting everyone on the open web who needs a presence", it's hard to see how Wordpress the product is meeting that need. ~1/3 of US businesses have no owned/managed Internet presence at all (and the number is even lower outside of the US). Of the ones who do, something like 15% of them (iirc) are only on Facebook and/or Instagram, and that number is growing. Let's take that small business owner who doesn't yet have an online presence and give them a default Wordpress install, and then let's give them a Facebook business page creator - which one do you think they'll be more successful at completing? Or if I need a simple blog/newsletter - let's try Wordpress vs. Substack or Wordpress vs. Medium - which is going to be easier? If you say that's not the target market for Wordpress, that's fine, but every interview with Matt Mullenwig gives me the impression HE thinks that's the target market for Wordpress/Automattic - everyone who needs an online presence. By limiting Wordpress to only technical users and/or websites that are built by pros, it's basically ceding swaths of the user population to these purely commercial platforms that are open to varying degrees.
- dazc 5y ago
  Fair argument although wasn't this the idea behind the .org/.com which was a kind of a best of both worlds solution that seemed to work OK up until now?

coldtea 5y ago

>In fairness to Matt and Automattic, Wordpress pre-Gutenberg was basically unusable by non-technical users. While I'm pro-Gutenberg (see my answer above), the WP editor pre-Gutenberg was absolutely fine for "non-technical users" too. It's adoption, for regular users like plain blog authors and journalists and so on, had already been massive (in the "tens or even hundreds of millions userbase" level massive...

mattzito 5y ago
Yeah, in an attempt to be concise, some nuance was lost - I think Wordpress as a pure editor, as a real CMS, when set up properly and/or using an OOTB template is perfectly fine. The post editor is good, you have all the basic formatting elements, page types, etc. But I think that limits you to two universes of setups - either built by a "pro" (for some definition of pro) who configures everything, installs plugins, installs and customizes the templates and basically gets everything perfect OR very basic cookie-cutter installs with lots of limitations. Either of those scenarios is fine, and I think it's great to have an ecosystem of small designers whose customers are DIFM users. I agree for "blog authors" and writers it's also fine, subject to the above limitations. The reality, though, is that market is tiny - "tens or hundreds of millions of users" - I do not think there are in the hundreds of millions of blog authors getting active traffic, though I maybe buy "10s of millions". Tumblr alone has 500+m active sites, even if we assume only 10% get actual consistent traffic (which would be roughly consistent with the data I remember), that alone is 50m active sites. If there are 10s of millions of bloggers, we would expect that the active # of sites are in the single-digit millions.
- coldtea 5y ago
  It's hasn't been just bloggers since forever. All kinds of sites, news, business, restaurants, community, ngo, all the way to the White House, use WordPress.

hammyhavoc 5y ago

Unusable by non-technical users? Lol. Then explain how everybody from kids to grandmas started blogs and ecommerce sites built on top of WordPress pre-Gutenberg.

mattzito 5y ago
I missed this earlier - as always, it’s hard to convey nuance in a HN comment, so of course there are non-technical people who are successful at building Wordpress sites. I’m not a mechanic, but I can fix things on my car, because I’m reasonably handy and can read instructions and compare diagrams and I know when I’m over my head. I think the analogy holds up for Wordpress too - there are non-technical people who can figure it out, and that’s great. But I would argue they are a small population relative to the total addressable market of people who need websites. Put another way - what data do we have that shows that “everybody from kids to grandmas” started sites on Wordpress? And to get more specific, how many of those users either had help getting it set up, or used a template and made zero changes to it, or had a hosting provider build a site for them using a builder atop Wordpress? Because the data I’ve seen suggests that users really struggle with any customization of a Wordpress site, and I think the adoption of Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy’s website central, etc. shows that there is a real gap there for Wordpress.
- hammyhavoc 5y ago
  The data I have is who I've had as clients for other services throughout the past decade. Clearly a trend in the UK and USA, and almost all of them figure it out on their own from the extensive documentation and YouTube videos available.