18 ms·

WordPress’ market share is shrinking

262 points by adamcarson 4y ago

altdataseller 4y ago
An alternative explanation: people who use Wordpress are those with personal blogs and they are being visited less, thus less present in top Alexa Rank sites.
- mitchdoogle 4y ago
  You underestimate how many small business sites are built with WordPress
  - czx4f4bd 4y ago
    Not just small businesses, either: https://wordpress.com/notable-users/ https://wordpress.com/notable-users/
stakkur 4y ago
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.
- ldiracdelta 4y ago
  Yes. Small businesses need microservices.
  - sidlls 4y ago
    Small businesses need mostly static sites that are easy to update content on. The non-static functionality some businesses need is generally quite constrained: appointment setting and information request forms being the two most likely, and there are plenty of X-as-a-service offerings in that space.
seydor 4y ago
tl;dr: wordpress went from 41.2% to 42.9% in a year - undeniably shrinking
justinator 4y ago
Chances I will ever use Squarespace or Wix: 0%.
- andybak 4y ago
  Well I guess chances I will ever use Squarespace, Wix or Wordpress: ~0%. But I'm not sure what that adds to the conversation without some background context on our requirements, use-cases or constraints?
  - mitchdoogle 4y ago
    In my opinion, the main difference between those is that you can self-host WordPress, so you can have full control over your site. Wix and Squarespace are hosted on their own servers. It's a lot easier, from a development point of view, to customize WordPress to do what you want.
  - dgb23 4y ago
    There’s literally a market for extracting data from those platforms so people can move to more flexible solutions that they can control and extend.
    - andybak 4y ago
      I don't disagree but I'm still not sure how that relates to my comment or the one I replied to.
- haswell 4y ago
  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.
  - CSSer 4y ago
    Sorta, kinda. Some of us do agency work for clients. We're consulted for our expertise to help medium to large companies avoid pitfalls like vendor lock-in (relevant in this case), performance bottlenecks, and cumbersome content management. We're then paid to implement those solutions in a creative, strategic and compelling way. I don't know if it'll hold my interest, but it was certainly a way to get into the industry. It's a great fit for anyone who's passionate about advertising, marketing, and technology. I think there's a (perhaps unintentional) true, deeper subtext to what you're saying though. WordPress has become too undifferentiated. There are parts of WP that are very mature and still as of yet unbeaten, but that's not what it takes to stay relevant.
stefanos82 4y ago
WordPress will continue losing market share for the simplest reason: people fed up with the coercion of Full-Site Editing (FSE) by Automattic. Community's reaction via comments' section [1] for Gutenberg plugin was a clear indication that people will eventually go away, had they not revoke their decision. They haven't which led to the fork [2] of WordPress thus dividing the community, at least for a while. Had they listened to their community to acquire Elementor and make it part of WP core, things would have been a lot better today than they currently are I'm afraid. They have wasted countless resources and valuable time that could be poured in improving Elementor and WordPress in general. I have tried to find tutorials, articles, and books about using FSE and couldn't find anything updated. It's just sad to be honest with you... [1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/gutenberg/ [2] https://www.classicpress.net/
- pupppet 4y ago
  I used to tell people WP is a solid base to build your website if you know what you're doing, but with Gutenberg and not knowing how much longer the Classic Editor plugin will be supported I keep my WP praise to myself.
  - stefanos82 4y ago
    That's the spirit. Currently I'm learning Laravel, because I have dealt with a lot of WordPress custom development and had lots of headaches, especially with multilanguage support. I find it incredible it does not support such a standard feature and you are forced to buy a plugin that is actually a CMS written as a plugin...we are talking about an Inception type of thing, if you think about it with the whole CMS inside a CMS! Madness, complete madness!
  - ishjoh 4y ago
    4 years ago my team built out a new CMS website for a large media company that had many different sub brands and multiple language requirements. We did a lengthy comparison against a big range or CMS solutions, we found Django CMS https://www.django-cms.org/en/ https://www.django-cms.org/en/ fulfilled all our requirements the best. After having used it for years I can say it's an excellent product. Easy to setup, easy to learn (any Django dev can pick it up almost instantly), secure, has LTS versions. It's just an excellent CMS. It's the first product I reach for now when needing a CMS system. I am not affiliated with Django CMS in any way, I just really love their product.
partiallypro 4y ago
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 pages will just break outright and resort to JSON errors, not to mention the built in blocks are awful and 3rd party blocks often break. That probably turned off a lot of people. It's still easier to just buy a theme that has a built in page builder and you'll get similar Lighthouse scores to Gutenburg (this being for average users, not custom themers, etc).
- debaserab2 4y ago
  I’ve replaced about five or six different WP installs with square space now. Never had a problem with it looking good, and surely don’t miss the increased vulnerability footprint that comes with hosting WP.
- openthc 4y ago
  The subjective part is "look good". I've sent at least a dozen small business to Squarespace and helped them get it tuned -- the look has always been "good enough" for them to move on to real business problems. It gets their information into Google (et al), provides the domain to link to from their IG, FB, Twitter, etc, etc -- so those traffic sources resolve to their own main truth.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  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.
  - 4y ago
pluc 4y ago
Die a hero or live long enough to become a vilain
kappuchino 4y ago
Do you have the same impression: Each and every plugin/extension has a commercial pro version that keeps on nagging to buy its extended warrenty ... sorry, no, to subscribe to updates for just 29.99 each, right? So 29.99 for instagram connections, 39.99 for backups pro (i'm making names and prices up, but you know the drill.) and for just 20 dollars more a security/virus check for ... what?!?! are you f**king kidding me? I've started to use pelican. It creates a flat file-based website with all I need. (See: https://blog.getpelican.com/ https://blog.getpelican.com/)
- tootie 4y ago
  Are you running a basic blog? We have some WordPress sites that are sorta unloved, but they are able to use these commercial plugins for a few hundred bucks to enable custom forms, payments, event ticketing, event calendars and they're just one-click installs and some CSS.
- _fat_santa 4y ago
  It's not just the plugins, this culture seeps into just about every guide about Wordpress. Read any guide and it's almost never a person that is just offering helpful advice, it's almost always some SEO spam that leads you on only to hit you with "buy my services/plugins/etc to fix this problem". Last time I did any work around WP this drove me insane. I remember trying to setup backup or something else simple and I was loosing my mind because there wasn't a single guide that just told you how to do it, they all beat around the bush and eventually the post just turns into a sales copy for their plugin/service/other overpriced bullshit. Coming from the JS ecosystem, you realize just how different the culture is. Sure there are professional services in the JS ecosystem that cost money, but there's plenty of folks that are just trying to pay it forward and be helpful to the community, even the companies are good stewards. With Wordpress no, everyone is just out to make a quick buck selling you on something.
  - stevenicr 4y ago
    You are right about much of what is out there sadly. I recently engaged in a spirited discussion about this issue ( https://wptavern.com/wordpress-product-launches-roundup-appexperts-wp-wallet-block-styles-and-stock-control-for-woocommerce#comment-422103 https://wptavern.com/wordpress-product-launches-roundup-appe... ) And it was uncovered that not only are people who are in close to the main development focused on releasing premium paid upgrades that require yearly fees - I contend that they are also holding back what should be basic styling options from being available in core as well. ( https://wptavern.com/wordpress-product-launches-roundup-appexperts-wp-wallet-block-styles-and-stock-control-for-woocommerce#comment-422258 https://wptavern.com/wordpress-product-launches-roundup-appe... ) I mean, just wow.
siquick 4y ago
The only people I know who hate Wordpress are the developers who have had the misfortune of having to manage an instance of Wordpress. All the marketing and content people I have worked with love it.
- code_runner 4y ago
  The matches my experience. They can manage whatever web of crazy they want in Wordpress… if they need something from the dev side we can play with some plugins until it works. Sometimes the answer is “oh god we can’t do that”… and that seemed to be ok if we had some alternatives
- technion 4y ago
  You can add to that "people who manage web hosting servers". Across our fleet, disabling hacked instances is a routine event. There is often a marketing person that wants to argue - according to their industry, WordPress is leading the security space. It's incredible how different industries view the product.
  - ratww 4y ago
    > according to their industry, WordPress is leading the security space It's not the marketing industry. It's just that some people have this tendency of conflating popularity with supreme quality. "It can't be bad if it's popular". Specialists in the marketing industry knows very well that outdated Wordpress is a minefield.
  - rhd 4y ago
    And SOC/CSIRT folks. A staggering amount of incidents involve an external wordpress install used as free real estate by threat actors in some way (e.g. phishing kit, malware infra).
- peckrob 4y ago
  I've done some Wordpress consulting work in the past. I wouldn't say I hate Wordpress. I advocate for it's use in some cases! I think it is a fantastic piece of software for what it natively does. You want a blogging platform? Wordpress is one of the best, hands down. You want a basic CMS that is so dead simple that anyone that can use a word processor can update the website? Wordpress excels at this, because that is what it was designed to do. But I do think it is a poor solution in a lot of cases where it has been shoehorned into. People keep grafting so much extra, unnecessary crap onto what is still, at it's core, a blogging platform. Often this is done by low-skill, low-paid "consultants" with very little experience in writing maintainable, secure code. Literally all they know how to do is write Wordpress code. I would often end up having to clean up the mess from these folks, who often still write PHP like it's 2007 and they haven't learned better [0]. Wordpress's architecture has, until relatively recently, encouraged this behavior. Their stubborn refusal to move beyond PHP 5 for many years (and continuing to support absolutely ancient versions of PHP 5 at that!) held their entire ecosystem back from writing better, more secure code for a long, long time. And, more broadly, held PHP as a whole back, as they were among its largest players. It was really hard to make the case for hosts to upgrade PHP when Wordpress still supported whatever ancient version of PHP the host was providing. Their internal architecture can be very messy in places and documentation often contradictory about what the "correct" or even preferred way to do something is because there are multiple ways implemented at different times. I will give them credit: Wordpress itself doesn't have too many gaping security holes anymore. Most of those has been patched. It's the plugins and themes that provide the attack surface now. The public plugins themselves (and to a lesser extent the themes) are of such widely variable quality that it is difficult to know what to use and trust. You're probably okay with the "official" plugins and most of the widely-installed third party plugins, but you get too far off the beaten path, you find a lot of garbage (and, to be fair, a few gems as well). And any custom plugin I find is immediately suspect for the reasons above. Building a theme? Which of these multiple ways of user customization do you support? All of them? None of them? Or do you just write your own customization further messing up the UX for writers and editors who have little idea how to manage Wordpress beyond the very basics of writing a post. Oftentimes when I would come into a Wordpress case, there's 30 or so plugins installed, half of which are disabled and you have no idea what is causing the client's problem. It takes a few hours just to untangle the mess, and you can't ask the last "consultant" because they wrote garbage code, threw it over the wall and disappeared. It's the reason I usually don't take Wordpress cases anymore unless it's someone I know or an installation I did, myself, from scratch that hasn't been messed with by anyone else. Wordpress is a great blogging platform and basic CMS. It's when people start trying to make it do things beyond this that problems start to accrue. I don't hate Wordpress. I hate what people try to do with it. When Wordpress is your hammer, everything looks like a custom post type. [0] https://phptherightway.com/ https://phptherightway.com/
dvngnt_ 4y ago
linktree is a very lightweight alternative that i see a lot of people use
- andybak 4y ago
  https://linktr.ee https://linktr.ee ? That seems an entirely different thing, unless there's something I'm missing.
  - pphysch 4y ago
    A good chunk of current WP use cases can be handled by a linktree.
  - Sirened 4y ago
    tons of people use linktree on social media sites like Instagram or TikTok where linking to things is particularly hard (i.e. links are not clickable anywhere except the one link slot in your bio). Sites like linktree let people make a little landing page with links to all their other stuff, which is often enough for many people.
dpcan 4y ago
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 nightmares, that new blocks theme thing, and more. I just want them to back off already. It’s a nightmare keeping hundreds of clients up to date.
- albatrosstrophy 4y ago
  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?
  - marc_io 4y ago
    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.
  - hrbf 4y ago
    Recently, I’ve come to appreciate Kirby (https://getkirby.com/ https://getkirby.com/). It’s commercial but reasonably priced. Clean, powerful and relaxed with updates.
    - manuelmoreale 4y ago
      As someone with probably 30+ sites built with Kirby I’d agree that it’s better than WP in many ways but it’s very developers oriented and it’s not really a replacement for WP for the average user. And when I say developers oriented I mean it in a good way.
      - hrbf 4y ago
jokabrink 4y ago
From the blog post: > If WordPress is shrinking, something else must be growing, this is, after all, a zero sum game. The very clear winners at the moment are Wix and Squarespace. I disagree with the authors findings: When taking a look at the quaterly data https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all/q https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma..., one can clearly see that WP and Shopify at least plateaued which is alright. But the authors conclusion, that WP's loss gives points to Wix and SqSpace for me does not hold: The numbers for "None" still decreases and much more strongly than the two mentioned above. He conveniently forgets the "None" partition, making is entire argument/criticism (for me) somewhat thin. He could in the same way argue, that Wix and Squarespace are more successful in getting non-CMS websites to switch.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I’ve noticed that a number of businesses that would have had Long abandoned websites now just have long abandoned Facebook pages.
- chris_wot 4y ago
  They need to look at how people used Shopify. I'd say they have lost market share to Shopify!
- esquire_900 4y ago
  I agree. Given the rounding (43.0 and 42.9 could theoretically just be a 0.01 difference) & measuring bias there might be no declining effect here at all.
CSSer 4y ago
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 creation, organization and editing experience that is as mature, reliable and affordable as WordPress.
- mitchdoogle 4y ago
  WordPress is still at 43% according to this post. That is still remarkable and to me means WP will be hanging around for many years to come even if they lose some share
- pineconewarrior 4y ago
  I am bearish and just waiting for someone to figure out a solid middle ground between a drag-and-drop pagebuilder + content-as-data. Gutenberg ain't it. Builder.io looks promising?
- xzel 4y ago
  After taking a stab into building with Gutenberg I'm incredibly bearish. Automatic has abandoned both of its customers, plugin/theme developers and non-technical website owners, due to, imo, huge amount of VC funding it took on. Gutenberg is at best, half baked and broken and at worst an ever changing API of compromises. I'm trying to convince my partner to look into creating custom Shopify themes or plugins and possibly creating a full service consulting company.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  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.
code_runner 4y ago
When I found out the landing page at a previous job was Wordpress based I was a little miffed, but in practice it wasn’t that bad to work with for what I needed. I wasn’t doing the design work etc… but setting up some forwards and other in the weeds things wasn’t really bad at all. I wouldn’t want to be the sole maintainer, but it’s really not the worst thing I’ve had to work with.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
goldcd 4y ago
I think the "private website" space is shrinking - despite what adverts for Wix and Squarespace might infer. The consumer/blog space of geocities, tripod and the like went to social media. Then we went through a period of "businesses putting up 10 pages for a fixed price" through first of all "a local web guy" then by themselves using Wix/WP/SS etc. I've just had a bathroom fitted by a guy who functions purely on Instagram for his portfolio and Whatsapp for communication. As I'm old and curmudgeonly I wanted an email address, and when I got it, it's the one that came free with his phone. Even local restaurants seem to be changing - using aggregators as their primary touch-point. Can't really blame them. They can easily submit their static stuff - opening times, location and menu - and the complex stuff like a booking system, taking deposits, sending calendar reminders is just handled by a single entity who's good at this stuff. WP seems to occupy this weird middle-ground I don't see as being attractive to anyone. As a light user there are dedicated CMS for your industry - for the hardcore, you hand-build it. WP, paying for packages, and being on the hook when they don't play nice - Who-tf is the target market?
- pipeline_peak 4y ago
  I see saying, blogs have definitely been shrinking. The web is too large and complex to be discovered unless your service is within one of the 5 or so major social platforms. To own a domain is almost a status symbol, letting users know “we are an established entity”. It’s pretty revealing when a local bar cover band or a Chinese restaurant has its own website. It’s almost always decrepit in maintenance and low traffic (as if it could handle more). Wordpress, Blogspot, and all these other template engine/blog platform things were the Web 2.0 answer, but I don’t think those types of services are going away. It’s a skill to implement a modern site not many people want to learn or hire when these platforms exist. Plenty of domain sites are powered by them. I just think this post is a telltale sign Wordpress is in a saturated market.
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    The fact that we’ve overcomplicated the skill set needed to maintain a “modern” website has helped contribute to this problem. A static website could be so bloody simple. Just save a bloody Word document to HTML with your pictures and menu and telephone number and open hours and links to maps and upload it to a folder. But… Even basic file handling skills are becoming uncommon.
ozten 4y ago
Freelance developers selling WordPress to their clients (and who build custom themes and plugins) are being ignored by WP core and they are regularly broken by changes. It seems like Automatic is optimizing for Wix marketshare and abandoning some of it's key champions. I think they could have avoided much of this by listening to these devs, having backwards compatible designs, and slowing down to produce higher quality code.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Strange to hear BC breaks are common since its architecture screams procedural and dated. Though some of that could be they still technically support PHP 5.
  - ozten 4y ago
    Gutenberg brings React and a block architecture. That blurs the lines between "chrome" and end-user styles. This is more at the CSS and React level. The amount of !important CSS rules going into core is kind of terrifying.
    - pineconewarrior 4y ago
      The amount of time I spend in a specificity war between theme styles and wp core's ever-changing sheets is far too much! The block library stylesheet is awful, and there is also no interface to interact with it directly. Instead we get to edit a json file which gives us access to a few dozen properties and deal with that. Not to mention the incomplete javascript and PHP interfaces which seem to be developed by two battling teams... :(
subtledigital 4y ago
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.
- pineconewarrior 4y ago
  I 100% agree with you here. Clients have an awful time working with Gutenberg. While the editor UX continues to get more convoluted, so too does the DX. PHP and React interfaces grow further apart in their capabilities and it's really just outrageous to have to master so many things to create a simple block in the editor. It's really just not worth the effort.
- ldiracdelta 4y ago
  "DIY platforms" Do you mean wix et c. ? Or `create-react-app`
synicalx 4y ago
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Wordpress, is in fact, Plugin-hell/Wordpress, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Plugins plus Wordpress. Wordpress is not an ecommerce system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning ecommerce system made useful by the freemium plugins, security vulnerabilities and PHP comprising a full CMS as defined by POSIX.
- stefanos82 4y ago
  You have confused Operating System with Content Management System here...POSIX has nothing to do with CMS; as its name stands POSIX means "Portable Operating System Interface".
  - synicalx 4y ago
    You've confused a joke with a serious post here.
aceazzameen 4y ago
Recently I considered building a new site with WordPress. I haven't used it in years, and looking at it again I didn't think it's the right fit anymore. It feels too limiting maybe? Right now I'm considering going the https://www.11ty.dev https://www.11ty.dev route instead. Anyone have any good experiences with it?
- coldtea 4y ago
  So, Wordpress, with its very flexible schemas and tens of thousands of plugins, and total freedom to do whatever with custom php is "too limiting" but a static site generator is not? Maybe have another look?
  - aceazzameen 4y ago
    Yeah, I definitely phrased that wrong. I recently built a blogging/gallery template that I'm very happy with. My goal is to keep it JS free. I originally wanted to apply it as a theme for PHP/WordPress, since I already had an older one I could rework. But it didn't feel like the end result with JS was worth it. Hence the static site generator route. In theory I think I'll have more control for exactly what I want.
  - todotask 4y ago
    I still haven’t get the approximate number of plugins, assume I checked the WordPres sitemap of plugins seem to be less than “tens of thousands” (excluded those that are already outdated)?
    - coldtea 4y ago
      "The Plugin Directory currently lists over 54,000 plugins with 1.5 billion total downloads".
      - todotask 4y ago
        That’s the point, I have checked plugin’s sitemap at the source of truth.
ivanmontillam 4y ago
I agree with the article author. Their Full Site Editing move became a lagging factor on their adoption. Specially when they complicated it further by marrying with React as their front-end counterpart. I consider WordPress a legacy codebase, because they seem to be unable to drop PHP 5.6 support. Anything that doesn't conform to that standard when submitting a new plugin to their repository, gets rejected immediately (I've seen this first hand). I understand that breaking with their PHP 5.6 past implies being reborn into a next generation CMS, because many shared hostings that are able to run WordPress are set up that way, that'd break a great part of that 42.9% of the Internet. It requires a complete rewrite and marking the current one as a legacy product. It's what holds them back, technologically-wise. WordPress became the dinosaur it sought to destroy when Matt Mullenweg forked it from b2/cafelog.
- ivanmontillam 4y ago
  To further extend my own comment: I don't know if you believe in "technical debt" but there's definitely the existence of "product debt". If your product isn't matching customer requirements, or if you're trying to pull one of "I am the master and people will love what I do", you increase the risk of market contact dissonance, fancy term for: you're not responding to customers' needs or wants. WordPress is a behemoth that has been losing touch with its customers, carried over in the meantime by the train of recommendations and network effects; but that bubble is about to explode, imho.
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  Is it a good idea to drop PHP support? PHP is very powerful and for all the hate, has a relatively gentle learning curve. Or maybe I misunderstand what you’re saying.
  - ivanmontillam 4y ago
    It's a good idea to drop PHP 5.6 support. From what I understand PHP 7.x onwards is awesome. I've not experienced that myself as I moved to Python 3.x long before PHP 7.x came out, but I trust the word of my friends.
throw0101a 4y ago
Like BSD, I won't believe WordPress is dying until Netcraft confirms it.
RichardHeart 4y ago
Thus we're all less robust in regards to censorship and automated customer service horror.
nikolay 4y ago
WordPress is the most giant bowl of spaghetti code in existence ever! One must wonder not why the market share is shrinking but why it is still a thing! Not only it's buggy and hard to scale, but it's also costly! All the freemium plugins become very expensive! A nonprofit I was involved with had to pay thousands per year to keep an essential WooCommerce match at least 10% of the functionality of Shopify, which comes at a fraction of the price! Not to mention that WordPress still stores massive data structures as serialized arrays in single columns in old versions of MySQL, and the consistency of the data is only a matter of luck! Most plugins are written by amateurs and easily corrupt data! One such example is the famous (and expensive!) plugin GiveWP! With a very low-volume website, it kept corrupting the data. For months, their support tried to recover the data and couldn't! The typical troubleshooting suggestion for any WordPress plugin is: to disable all plugins (in Production, yeah, with a capital "P" as it's scared) and give us full admin access to the site to troubleshoot! Unfortunately, when it comes to WordPress commercial plugins, it's the typical blame-the-others game - it's never the plugin that crashes. It's the other plugins that make it crush! It's so often to see the same jQuery plugin being loaded multiple times or multiple versions of it fighting with each other because different plugin vendors use different versions! Please, do this world a favor and stop using WordPress!
- ipaddr 4y ago
  I have experience with both shopify and woocommerce and the difference is WooCommerce can be free if you spend the time or use free plugins. You can do anything with WooCommerce you can do somethings with shopify. Shopify has a base cost plus additional costs for anything but you can dump money on both. Most of the frameworks and open source software is written by amateurs.
  - nikolay 4y ago
    All extensions have annual pricing, and WooCommerce requires expensive hosting, so Shopify is definitely cheaper and more convenient if you use their merchant service and their credit card reader, which is integrated into their inventory tracking (the WooCommerce inventory tracking is a joke, and it only kind of works if you use Square).
dbg31415 4y ago
WordPress... it's just in an odd space. Most small businesses can just use social media / menu hosting service. Larger businesses can afford real CMS tools. WordPress has gotten better in recent years, but it's still at core a "blog" platform. And frankly that makes all the themes and features either annoying duct-tapped in add-ons, or backward looking. I recently tried configuring a new site for a neighbor. And it was OK, but like... the neighbor asked for some simple things: ADA Compliance, and No User Comments anywhere. It was a hack, like it was a lot more work than it should have been to get him to the point where his theme actually worked the way he wanted it to. On top of that... like it was just tedious to get ADA Compliance with some of the themes. They didn't use ARIA tags, or have good color pickers... worse, like you'd pick the color for one font, and it would use the color in the footer or some other place. Totally frustrating. And fixing all the things needed to get the site live made sure that he would never be able to ever upgrade that theme or theme builder tool. Oof. It's very much a disposable site. One that isn't factoring in modern needs... forcing users to download add-ons instead of just having easy to customize templates for each page type build in to the core system... by default you only get Blog Post, and Page... but like I just want "Staff Bio" and "Product" and "Store Locations" and a bunch of other simple page types. In the end... I just ended up moving him over to Squarespace, where most everything just worked without any dated "must be a blog platform first" notions. Oh, and the page editor... holy hell don't get me started on how clunky WordPress' page editor is. It's gotten better... it's just not good. Feels like they are still letting volunteer developers do the UX instead of investing in real UX designers. Meh, it's free... and you get what you pay for. Eh, you actually get a huge headache with WordPress. I hate using WordPress, I can't recommend it to anyone. They need to just ditch the notion that anyone wants to use it as a blogging platform, and convert it to a CMS-first platform. Then they might have a shot.
indymike 4y ago
The problem we have is that getting traffic to a website is expensive and difficult compared to 5-10 years ago. This is really problematic for small businesses that just want traffic for search from local visits or in a niche category. Wordpress losing market ins't surprising, hosting costs money - and the choices for WP are pay wordpress dot com or get a shared hosting account like it's 2004. Facebook pages are free. Search isn't delivering traffic. Instagram, Facebook Pages, Google My Business, etc... are all making to cost of maintaining a nice website simply not worth it.
unfocused 4y ago
I’ve been managing (volunteer) a Wordpress site for 12 years now for a non-profit organization that hosts a university competition. They post about 1 or 2 times a month, and I created a registration form and email confirmation. All free. The only fees they pay are server hosting and domain name. I think we have paid on average around $40 a year. So for the past decade, they spent $500 on website fees and no ads. So I guess you can say if your goal is just to send information and don’t have a need for profit, I would say Wordpress is a good fit.
ggm 4y ago
Maybe I misread things, but this chart of market share is not declining in any real sense, its 1 percentage point variance in 43% share. So its 2% variance of their market share. Did I misread?
- marc_io 4y ago
  I don't think you misread. This post makes a lot of assumptions based on a small change, in a brief time frame. IMO, it's not enough to dictate that WP market share is really shrinking in any significant way just because it lost less than 1% in a few months. Let's see if the trend persist in the coming years to make statements like that.
chris_wot 4y ago
It is shrinking because they have decided to pivot to Gutenberg. What they don't realise is that there is a major cottage industry of people developing custom themes for their clients, who use things like WooCommerce for selling. These people know how Wordpress works through the old, classic system of themes but couldn't care less about block themes.
exodust 4y ago
> "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/ 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.
- todotask 4y ago
  In my case, I haven’t tried to optimize database that run Woocommerce, still, there is some sluggish performance need to manually remove require complicate coding. As for the anti-fraud plugin which use MaxMind database, could be worth that annual subscription compare to hire a developer and build the same backend for your business.
karaterobot 4y ago
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...
calcsam 4y ago
In March, a number of technologies that were growing quickly on W3techs suddenly went flat or declining (Shopify and WordPress are examples). Others experienced a sudden surge (Squarespace, Wix). I suspect W3techs is rolling out a change in their methodology.
skilled 4y ago
Like some already said, WordPress also paid for a lot of things in my life. And recently I was on a 3 year hiatus from the platform because of real life situation. Having been back on the saddle for the last 7 months, I do agree that FSE is an overly ambitious project that might take further 5 years to get it right. I don’t necessarily dislike it, though it doesn’t bother me either. If I want a site builder I will just use one of the established plugins. I am more annoyed that the work being done on the actual content editor is subpar at best. Some core issues that still plague it are back to top clipping, slow performance of loading media, and extremely poor integration with block plugins. But even with all the glaring issues, WordPress will remain a top choice for years to come. It’s so easy to get the site to do you want without needing to hire an agency that will leave a dent in your budget. Nice to see people like Joost step up and talk about it.
d3nj4l 4y ago
Is it just me, or is WP's new block-based editor (Gutenberg) easily the worst of its kind? I maintain a small blog for translations on WP, and each time I'm trying to do anything non-trivial it's a massive pain, with obvious and infuriating UI bugs and glitches. I've seriously been considering switching to self-hosted SSG, but many of the people I work with aren't all that familiar with Markdown or Git to be able to do that well enough.
etchalon 4y ago
Gutenberg is not a good product, and while I understand why it exists, it feels absolutely ridiculous that the WordPress team keeps charging ahead with it.
nakitatibbs22 4y ago
[dead]
- pmlnr 4y ago
  > For example you render with php and then you have some jquery that gives interaction. Yes, that is how we (used to) do things: look up progressive enhancements.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ufmace 4y ago
Maybe I've gotten something wrong here, but as far as I can tell, Wix and Squarespace are entirely closed-source hosted solutions. This might be a small and hard to verify decline, but it still makes me kind of sad to see more things moving from something you at least can host yourself if you want to something entirely proprietary. Wordpress may have its warts, but you can still actually get the code, and it still works mostly okay and can easily be hosted yourself in a wide variety of ways. If you want to hack it to do something weird or crazy, you actually can. IMO that beats locking everything into some company's system that you may not be able to extract or change.
grassmudhorse 4y ago
> this is, after all, a zero sum game. No it isn't. Lost me here.
zerop 4y ago
Buddypress's commercial fork, buddyboss, is doing better than Buddypress. Any users of Buddyboss, need reviews as i am planning to use it for a community project.
ravivyas 4y ago
Contrarian View: The CMS market is expanding. Notes from the post - The %is actually growing, ~41% to ~43%, minor drops in the last few months The large point is how the CMS market has diversified, which is evident from the fact that the next largest player is Shopify at ~4%. CMS is too broad a term which envelops personal blogs to E-commerce. The challenge Wordpress will have in the long run is trying to do everything for everyone and not being the best at anything.
chupchap 4y ago
Who's still using Alexa? The quality of data is only as good as the people using the service. I haven't seen a single person who uses Alexa as a plugin or as a service in ages so I don't know how to treat this data. The only companies with a legit data would be search engines and browsers.
cheeseface 4y ago
This is not surprising. The WordPress scene is super confusing right now. I spent almost 5 years building WordPress websites professionally and stopped a few years go. If I would need to build a WordPress site today, I would not know if I should start. Even the themes at WordPress.com (the hosted "user-friendly" version) have wildly different editing experiences.
radium3d 4y ago
The glitchy / beta (alpha?) level performance testing tools introduced by Google in the last two years have also been contributing to the lower scores and the constant changing of the scoring metrics has not helped developers such as myself get a strong hold on what Google wants. We are just now within the last 6 months really getting a strong foothold on things like CLS when using page builder plugins such as SiteOrigin Page Builder. They added a features in October last year that really knocks the CLS to zero and we've seen mobile scores way up in the 90-100 range now. WordPress can perform well with a well implemented caching system such as the one WPEngine setup on Google Cloud.
NGRhodes 4y ago
I'm continuing to use my own blogs/websites (not as much as social media, as much as an information store for myself as for my tiny audiences, not monetised) as an insurance; we have zero control over the data we post on any popular social media platform. One day it could suddenly disappear for a number of reasons - technical fault, decision by the platform provider, interference by the authorities, malicious destruction etc...
tux2bsd 4y ago
Wordpress is a cunt, it is fundamentally flawed in its design. The amount of hoop jumping to change the URL of a site is fucking insane (the site's URL is strewn all throughout the database...). A sane framework might specify the URL(s) once in a config file and/or DB field, but ultimately leaving that side to the web server configuration where it belongs. After that you can get into all the other issues people are talking about already.
sidlls 4y ago
Most users of WordPress would be better served by a static site generator system. Unfortunately, it seems most of these are very much "by developers, for developers" in flavor. They're overly complicated and insufficiently developed in the front-end to be useful to most of WordPress' current target market (e.g., businesses with a need to present mostly static content, but with the ability to make changes and deploy/publish them without too much technical know-how required).
- sofixa 4y ago
  WordPress can be used as a static site generator via the Simply Statuc plugin. It needs some thought into the design ( which plugins won't work because it isn't dynamic anymore), but it's a decent way of having the UX for non-developers/other very technical folk while having the security, stability, deployability and maintainability of static hosting.
  - stefanos82 4y ago
    You do realize that this whole concept is an overkill, don't you? Just think about it: you need to have installed PHP, MySQL / MariaDB, and a plugin to generate static content, whereas with a SSG that exists you go straight to the phase of generating your content. Personally I plan to use Hugo for tiny to small websites that get updated once in a blue moon and for more complicated websites, I have many options to choose from; for sure WordPress is not one of them and that's a fact!
    - sofixa 4y ago
      Of course it's overkill, but i prefer that than to "force" marketing and adjacent people to learn Markdown and maybe even HTML/CSS ( at least the basics). My own website is built with Hugo, but based on my experience building WordPress websites and helping friends "using" them with basic HTML/CSS tips i wouldn't recommend that for everyone.
      - stefanos82 4y ago
vatotemking 4y ago
WordPress plugins (and themes) are plagued by freemium versions. SEO has been gamed. Gone are the days of finding a non-freemium, single functionality plugin, that just works. You have to be a seasoned WP developer to wade thru all the crap that is the WP ecosystem, or if all else fails, write your own functionality via functions.php.
rambojazz 4y ago
0.4% is like a rounding error, or normal variability. They should present data from years ago.
rograndom 4y ago
There was a ramp up of new WordPress and specifically WooCommerce sites starting in late summer of 2020 and spiking huge in December 2020 & January 2021. These are people that were stuck at home due to lockdown or losing their jobs and they started online businesses. The lot of those signed up for 1 or 2 year hosting plans and those came due around Feburary/March of this year. A large amount of those businesses failed, or the owners went back to work, etc etc, and no longer need their sites.
- Yabood 4y ago
  This is a plausible explanation considering that the drop in market share is not that big. It would be interesting to compare the numbers from the past two years.
Giorgi 4y ago
>losing 0.4% market share since February Seriously? 0.4% is what article calls "shrinking"
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Facebook lost 25% of its stock price in February from the announcement that it had lost 500K daily users out of 1.93 billion. That's 0.025%.
  - Giorgi 4y ago
    Yeah it was way more than just losing 500k daily users
calltrak 4y ago

262 points by adamcarson 4y ago

An alternative explanation: people who use Wordpress are those with personal blogs and they are being visited less, thus less present in top Alexa Rank sites.

mitchdoogle 4y ago
You underestimate how many small business sites are built with WordPress
- czx4f4bd 4y ago
  Not just small businesses, either: https://wordpress.com/notable-users/ https://wordpress.com/notable-users/

stakkur 4y ago

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.

ldiracdelta 4y ago
Yes. Small businesses need microservices.
- sidlls 4y ago
  Small businesses need mostly static sites that are easy to update content on. The non-static functionality some businesses need is generally quite constrained: appointment setting and information request forms being the two most likely, and there are plenty of X-as-a-service offerings in that space.

seydor 4y ago

tl;dr: wordpress went from 41.2% to 42.9% in a year - undeniably shrinking

justinator 4y ago

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

andybak 4y ago
Well I guess chances I will ever use Squarespace, Wix or Wordpress: ~0%. But I'm not sure what that adds to the conversation without some background context on our requirements, use-cases or constraints?
- mitchdoogle 4y ago
  In my opinion, the main difference between those is that you can self-host WordPress, so you can have full control over your site. Wix and Squarespace are hosted on their own servers. It's a lot easier, from a development point of view, to customize WordPress to do what you want.
- dgb23 4y ago
  There’s literally a market for extracting data from those platforms so people can move to more flexible solutions that they can control and extend.
  - andybak 4y ago
    I don't disagree but I'm still not sure how that relates to my comment or the one I replied to.
haswell 4y ago
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.
- CSSer 4y ago
  Sorta, kinda. Some of us do agency work for clients. We're consulted for our expertise to help medium to large companies avoid pitfalls like vendor lock-in (relevant in this case), performance bottlenecks, and cumbersome content management. We're then paid to implement those solutions in a creative, strategic and compelling way. I don't know if it'll hold my interest, but it was certainly a way to get into the industry. It's a great fit for anyone who's passionate about advertising, marketing, and technology. I think there's a (perhaps unintentional) true, deeper subtext to what you're saying though. WordPress has become too undifferentiated. There are parts of WP that are very mature and still as of yet unbeaten, but that's not what it takes to stay relevant.

stefanos82 4y ago

WordPress will continue losing market share for the simplest reason: people fed up with the coercion of Full-Site Editing (FSE) by Automattic. Community's reaction via comments' section [1] for Gutenberg plugin was a clear indication that people will eventually go away, had they not revoke their decision. They haven't which led to the fork [2] of WordPress thus dividing the community, at least for a while. Had they listened to their community to acquire Elementor and make it part of WP core, things would have been a lot better today than they currently are I'm afraid. They have wasted countless resources and valuable time that could be poured in improving Elementor and WordPress in general. I have tried to find tutorials, articles, and books about using FSE and couldn't find anything updated. It's just sad to be honest with you... [1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/gutenberg/ [2] https://www.classicpress.net/

pupppet 4y ago
I used to tell people WP is a solid base to build your website if you know what you're doing, but with Gutenberg and not knowing how much longer the Classic Editor plugin will be supported I keep my WP praise to myself.
- stefanos82 4y ago
  That's the spirit. Currently I'm learning Laravel, because I have dealt with a lot of WordPress custom development and had lots of headaches, especially with multilanguage support. I find it incredible it does not support such a standard feature and you are forced to buy a plugin that is actually a CMS written as a plugin...we are talking about an Inception type of thing, if you think about it with the whole CMS inside a CMS! Madness, complete madness!
- ishjoh 4y ago
  4 years ago my team built out a new CMS website for a large media company that had many different sub brands and multiple language requirements. We did a lengthy comparison against a big range or CMS solutions, we found Django CMS https://www.django-cms.org/en/ https://www.django-cms.org/en/ fulfilled all our requirements the best. After having used it for years I can say it's an excellent product. Easy to setup, easy to learn (any Django dev can pick it up almost instantly), secure, has LTS versions. It's just an excellent CMS. It's the first product I reach for now when needing a CMS system. I am not affiliated with Django CMS in any way, I just really love their product.

partiallypro 4y ago

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 pages will just break outright and resort to JSON errors, not to mention the built in blocks are awful and 3rd party blocks often break. That probably turned off a lot of people. It's still easier to just buy a theme that has a built in page builder and you'll get similar Lighthouse scores to Gutenburg (this being for average users, not custom themers, etc).

debaserab2 4y ago
I’ve replaced about five or six different WP installs with square space now. Never had a problem with it looking good, and surely don’t miss the increased vulnerability footprint that comes with hosting WP.
openthc 4y ago
The subjective part is "look good". I've sent at least a dozen small business to Squarespace and helped them get it tuned -- the look has always been "good enough" for them to move on to real business problems. It gets their information into Google (et al), provides the domain to link to from their IG, FB, Twitter, etc, etc -- so those traffic sources resolve to their own main truth.
Gigachad 4y ago
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.
- 4y ago

pluc 4y ago

Die a hero or live long enough to become a vilain

kappuchino 4y ago

Do you have the same impression: Each and every plugin/extension has a commercial pro version that keeps on nagging to buy its extended warrenty ... sorry, no, to subscribe to updates for just 29.99 each, right? So 29.99 for instagram connections, 39.99 for backups pro (i'm making names and prices up, but you know the drill.) and for just 20 dollars more a security/virus check for ... what?!?! are you f**king kidding me? I've started to use pelican. It creates a flat file-based website with all I need. (See: https://blog.getpelican.com/ https://blog.getpelican.com/)

tootie 4y ago
Are you running a basic blog? We have some WordPress sites that are sorta unloved, but they are able to use these commercial plugins for a few hundred bucks to enable custom forms, payments, event ticketing, event calendars and they're just one-click installs and some CSS.
_fat_santa 4y ago
It's not just the plugins, this culture seeps into just about every guide about Wordpress. Read any guide and it's almost never a person that is just offering helpful advice, it's almost always some SEO spam that leads you on only to hit you with "buy my services/plugins/etc to fix this problem". Last time I did any work around WP this drove me insane. I remember trying to setup backup or something else simple and I was loosing my mind because there wasn't a single guide that just told you how to do it, they all beat around the bush and eventually the post just turns into a sales copy for their plugin/service/other overpriced bullshit. Coming from the JS ecosystem, you realize just how different the culture is. Sure there are professional services in the JS ecosystem that cost money, but there's plenty of folks that are just trying to pay it forward and be helpful to the community, even the companies are good stewards. With Wordpress no, everyone is just out to make a quick buck selling you on something.
- stevenicr 4y ago
  You are right about much of what is out there sadly. I recently engaged in a spirited discussion about this issue ( https://wptavern.com/wordpress-product-launches-roundup-appexperts-wp-wallet-block-styles-and-stock-control-for-woocommerce#comment-422103 https://wptavern.com/wordpress-product-launches-roundup-appe... ) And it was uncovered that not only are people who are in close to the main development focused on releasing premium paid upgrades that require yearly fees - I contend that they are also holding back what should be basic styling options from being available in core as well. ( https://wptavern.com/wordpress-product-launches-roundup-appexperts-wp-wallet-block-styles-and-stock-control-for-woocommerce#comment-422258 https://wptavern.com/wordpress-product-launches-roundup-appe... ) I mean, just wow.

siquick 4y ago

The only people I know who hate Wordpress are the developers who have had the misfortune of having to manage an instance of Wordpress. All the marketing and content people I have worked with love it.

code_runner 4y ago
The matches my experience. They can manage whatever web of crazy they want in Wordpress… if they need something from the dev side we can play with some plugins until it works. Sometimes the answer is “oh god we can’t do that”… and that seemed to be ok if we had some alternatives
technion 4y ago
You can add to that "people who manage web hosting servers". Across our fleet, disabling hacked instances is a routine event. There is often a marketing person that wants to argue - according to their industry, WordPress is leading the security space. It's incredible how different industries view the product.
- ratww 4y ago
  > according to their industry, WordPress is leading the security space It's not the marketing industry. It's just that some people have this tendency of conflating popularity with supreme quality. "It can't be bad if it's popular". Specialists in the marketing industry knows very well that outdated Wordpress is a minefield.
- rhd 4y ago
  And SOC/CSIRT folks. A staggering amount of incidents involve an external wordpress install used as free real estate by threat actors in some way (e.g. phishing kit, malware infra).
peckrob 4y ago
I've done some Wordpress consulting work in the past. I wouldn't say I hate Wordpress. I advocate for it's use in some cases! I think it is a fantastic piece of software for what it natively does. You want a blogging platform? Wordpress is one of the best, hands down. You want a basic CMS that is so dead simple that anyone that can use a word processor can update the website? Wordpress excels at this, because that is what it was designed to do. But I do think it is a poor solution in a lot of cases where it has been shoehorned into. People keep grafting so much extra, unnecessary crap onto what is still, at it's core, a blogging platform. Often this is done by low-skill, low-paid "consultants" with very little experience in writing maintainable, secure code. Literally all they know how to do is write Wordpress code. I would often end up having to clean up the mess from these folks, who often still write PHP like it's 2007 and they haven't learned better [0]. Wordpress's architecture has, until relatively recently, encouraged this behavior. Their stubborn refusal to move beyond PHP 5 for many years (and continuing to support absolutely ancient versions of PHP 5 at that!) held their entire ecosystem back from writing better, more secure code for a long, long time. And, more broadly, held PHP as a whole back, as they were among its largest players. It was really hard to make the case for hosts to upgrade PHP when Wordpress still supported whatever ancient version of PHP the host was providing. Their internal architecture can be very messy in places and documentation often contradictory about what the "correct" or even preferred way to do something is because there are multiple ways implemented at different times. I will give them credit: Wordpress itself doesn't have too many gaping security holes anymore. Most of those has been patched. It's the plugins and themes that provide the attack surface now. The public plugins themselves (and to a lesser extent the themes) are of such widely variable quality that it is difficult to know what to use and trust. You're probably okay with the "official" plugins and most of the widely-installed third party plugins, but you get too far off the beaten path, you find a lot of garbage (and, to be fair, a few gems as well). And any custom plugin I find is immediately suspect for the reasons above. Building a theme? Which of these multiple ways of user customization do you support? All of them? None of them? Or do you just write your own customization further messing up the UX for writers and editors who have little idea how to manage Wordpress beyond the very basics of writing a post. Oftentimes when I would come into a Wordpress case, there's 30 or so plugins installed, half of which are disabled and you have no idea what is causing the client's problem. It takes a few hours just to untangle the mess, and you can't ask the last "consultant" because they wrote garbage code, threw it over the wall and disappeared. It's the reason I usually don't take Wordpress cases anymore unless it's someone I know or an installation I did, myself, from scratch that hasn't been messed with by anyone else. Wordpress is a great blogging platform and basic CMS. It's when people start trying to make it do things beyond this that problems start to accrue. I don't hate Wordpress. I hate what people try to do with it. When Wordpress is your hammer, everything looks like a custom post type. [0] https://phptherightway.com/ https://phptherightway.com/

dvngnt_ 4y ago

linktree is a very lightweight alternative that i see a lot of people use

andybak 4y ago
https://linktr.ee https://linktr.ee ? That seems an entirely different thing, unless there's something I'm missing.
- pphysch 4y ago
  A good chunk of current WP use cases can be handled by a linktree.
- Sirened 4y ago
  tons of people use linktree on social media sites like Instagram or TikTok where linking to things is particularly hard (i.e. links are not clickable anywhere except the one link slot in your bio). Sites like linktree let people make a little landing page with links to all their other stuff, which is often enough for many people.

dpcan 4y ago

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 nightmares, that new blocks theme thing, and more. I just want them to back off already. It’s a nightmare keeping hundreds of clients up to date.

albatrosstrophy 4y ago
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?
- marc_io 4y ago
  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.
- hrbf 4y ago
  Recently, I’ve come to appreciate Kirby (https://getkirby.com/ https://getkirby.com/). It’s commercial but reasonably priced. Clean, powerful and relaxed with updates.
  - manuelmoreale 4y ago
    As someone with probably 30+ sites built with Kirby I’d agree that it’s better than WP in many ways but it’s very developers oriented and it’s not really a replacement for WP for the average user. And when I say developers oriented I mean it in a good way.
    - hrbf 4y ago

jokabrink 4y ago

From the blog post: > If WordPress is shrinking, something else must be growing, this is, after all, a zero sum game. The very clear winners at the moment are Wix and Squarespace. I disagree with the authors findings: When taking a look at the quaterly data https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all/q https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma..., one can clearly see that WP and Shopify at least plateaued which is alright. But the authors conclusion, that WP's loss gives points to Wix and SqSpace for me does not hold: The numbers for "None" still decreases and much more strongly than the two mentioned above. He conveniently forgets the "None" partition, making is entire argument/criticism (for me) somewhat thin. He could in the same way argue, that Wix and Squarespace are more successful in getting non-CMS websites to switch.

bombcar 4y ago
I’ve noticed that a number of businesses that would have had Long abandoned websites now just have long abandoned Facebook pages.
chris_wot 4y ago
They need to look at how people used Shopify. I'd say they have lost market share to Shopify!
esquire_900 4y ago
I agree. Given the rounding (43.0 and 42.9 could theoretically just be a 0.01 difference) & measuring bias there might be no declining effect here at all.

CSSer 4y ago

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 creation, organization and editing experience that is as mature, reliable and affordable as WordPress.

mitchdoogle 4y ago
WordPress is still at 43% according to this post. That is still remarkable and to me means WP will be hanging around for many years to come even if they lose some share
pineconewarrior 4y ago
I am bearish and just waiting for someone to figure out a solid middle ground between a drag-and-drop pagebuilder + content-as-data. Gutenberg ain't it. Builder.io looks promising?
xzel 4y ago
After taking a stab into building with Gutenberg I'm incredibly bearish. Automatic has abandoned both of its customers, plugin/theme developers and non-technical website owners, due to, imo, huge amount of VC funding it took on. Gutenberg is at best, half baked and broken and at worst an ever changing API of compromises. I'm trying to convince my partner to look into creating custom Shopify themes or plugins and possibly creating a full service consulting company.
Gigachad 4y ago
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.

code_runner 4y ago

When I found out the landing page at a previous job was Wordpress based I was a little miffed, but in practice it wasn’t that bad to work with for what I needed. I wasn’t doing the design work etc… but setting up some forwards and other in the weeds things wasn’t really bad at all. I wouldn’t want to be the sole maintainer, but it’s really not the worst thing I’ve had to work with.

deleted 4y ago

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goldcd 4y ago

I think the "private website" space is shrinking - despite what adverts for Wix and Squarespace might infer. The consumer/blog space of geocities, tripod and the like went to social media. Then we went through a period of "businesses putting up 10 pages for a fixed price" through first of all "a local web guy" then by themselves using Wix/WP/SS etc. I've just had a bathroom fitted by a guy who functions purely on Instagram for his portfolio and Whatsapp for communication. As I'm old and curmudgeonly I wanted an email address, and when I got it, it's the one that came free with his phone. Even local restaurants seem to be changing - using aggregators as their primary touch-point. Can't really blame them. They can easily submit their static stuff - opening times, location and menu - and the complex stuff like a booking system, taking deposits, sending calendar reminders is just handled by a single entity who's good at this stuff. WP seems to occupy this weird middle-ground I don't see as being attractive to anyone. As a light user there are dedicated CMS for your industry - for the hardcore, you hand-build it. WP, paying for packages, and being on the hook when they don't play nice - Who-tf is the target market?

pipeline_peak 4y ago
I see saying, blogs have definitely been shrinking. The web is too large and complex to be discovered unless your service is within one of the 5 or so major social platforms. To own a domain is almost a status symbol, letting users know “we are an established entity”. It’s pretty revealing when a local bar cover band or a Chinese restaurant has its own website. It’s almost always decrepit in maintenance and low traffic (as if it could handle more). Wordpress, Blogspot, and all these other template engine/blog platform things were the Web 2.0 answer, but I don’t think those types of services are going away. It’s a skill to implement a modern site not many people want to learn or hire when these platforms exist. Plenty of domain sites are powered by them. I just think this post is a telltale sign Wordpress is in a saturated market.
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  The fact that we’ve overcomplicated the skill set needed to maintain a “modern” website has helped contribute to this problem. A static website could be so bloody simple. Just save a bloody Word document to HTML with your pictures and menu and telephone number and open hours and links to maps and upload it to a folder. But… Even basic file handling skills are becoming uncommon.

ozten 4y ago

Freelance developers selling WordPress to their clients (and who build custom themes and plugins) are being ignored by WP core and they are regularly broken by changes. It seems like Automatic is optimizing for Wix marketshare and abandoning some of it's key champions. I think they could have avoided much of this by listening to these devs, having backwards compatible designs, and slowing down to produce higher quality code.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
Strange to hear BC breaks are common since its architecture screams procedural and dated. Though some of that could be they still technically support PHP 5.
- ozten 4y ago
  Gutenberg brings React and a block architecture. That blurs the lines between "chrome" and end-user styles. This is more at the CSS and React level. The amount of !important CSS rules going into core is kind of terrifying.
  - pineconewarrior 4y ago
    The amount of time I spend in a specificity war between theme styles and wp core's ever-changing sheets is far too much! The block library stylesheet is awful, and there is also no interface to interact with it directly. Instead we get to edit a json file which gives us access to a few dozen properties and deal with that. Not to mention the incomplete javascript and PHP interfaces which seem to be developed by two battling teams... :(

subtledigital 4y ago

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.

pineconewarrior 4y ago
I 100% agree with you here. Clients have an awful time working with Gutenberg. While the editor UX continues to get more convoluted, so too does the DX. PHP and React interfaces grow further apart in their capabilities and it's really just outrageous to have to master so many things to create a simple block in the editor. It's really just not worth the effort.
ldiracdelta 4y ago
"DIY platforms" Do you mean wix et c. ? Or `create-react-app`

synicalx 4y ago

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Wordpress, is in fact, Plugin-hell/Wordpress, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Plugins plus Wordpress. Wordpress is not an ecommerce system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning ecommerce system made useful by the freemium plugins, security vulnerabilities and PHP comprising a full CMS as defined by POSIX.

stefanos82 4y ago
You have confused Operating System with Content Management System here...POSIX has nothing to do with CMS; as its name stands POSIX means "Portable Operating System Interface".
- synicalx 4y ago
  You've confused a joke with a serious post here.

aceazzameen 4y ago

Recently I considered building a new site with WordPress. I haven't used it in years, and looking at it again I didn't think it's the right fit anymore. It feels too limiting maybe? Right now I'm considering going the https://www.11ty.dev https://www.11ty.dev route instead. Anyone have any good experiences with it?

coldtea 4y ago
So, Wordpress, with its very flexible schemas and tens of thousands of plugins, and total freedom to do whatever with custom php is "too limiting" but a static site generator is not? Maybe have another look?
- aceazzameen 4y ago
  Yeah, I definitely phrased that wrong. I recently built a blogging/gallery template that I'm very happy with. My goal is to keep it JS free. I originally wanted to apply it as a theme for PHP/WordPress, since I already had an older one I could rework. But it didn't feel like the end result with JS was worth it. Hence the static site generator route. In theory I think I'll have more control for exactly what I want.
- todotask 4y ago
  I still haven’t get the approximate number of plugins, assume I checked the WordPres sitemap of plugins seem to be less than “tens of thousands” (excluded those that are already outdated)?
  - coldtea 4y ago
    "The Plugin Directory currently lists over 54,000 plugins with 1.5 billion total downloads".
    - todotask 4y ago
      That’s the point, I have checked plugin’s sitemap at the source of truth.

ivanmontillam 4y ago

I agree with the article author. Their Full Site Editing move became a lagging factor on their adoption. Specially when they complicated it further by marrying with React as their front-end counterpart. I consider WordPress a legacy codebase, because they seem to be unable to drop PHP 5.6 support. Anything that doesn't conform to that standard when submitting a new plugin to their repository, gets rejected immediately (I've seen this first hand). I understand that breaking with their PHP 5.6 past implies being reborn into a next generation CMS, because many shared hostings that are able to run WordPress are set up that way, that'd break a great part of that 42.9% of the Internet. It requires a complete rewrite and marking the current one as a legacy product. It's what holds them back, technologically-wise. WordPress became the dinosaur it sought to destroy when Matt Mullenweg forked it from b2/cafelog.

ivanmontillam 4y ago
To further extend my own comment: I don't know if you believe in "technical debt" but there's definitely the existence of "product debt". If your product isn't matching customer requirements, or if you're trying to pull one of "I am the master and people will love what I do", you increase the risk of market contact dissonance, fancy term for: you're not responding to customers' needs or wants. WordPress is a behemoth that has been losing touch with its customers, carried over in the meantime by the train of recommendations and network effects; but that bubble is about to explode, imho.
Robotbeat 4y ago
Is it a good idea to drop PHP support? PHP is very powerful and for all the hate, has a relatively gentle learning curve. Or maybe I misunderstand what you’re saying.
- ivanmontillam 4y ago
  It's a good idea to drop PHP 5.6 support. From what I understand PHP 7.x onwards is awesome. I've not experienced that myself as I moved to Python 3.x long before PHP 7.x came out, but I trust the word of my friends.

throw0101a 4y ago

Like BSD, I won't believe WordPress is dying until Netcraft confirms it.

RichardHeart 4y ago

Thus we're all less robust in regards to censorship and automated customer service horror.

nikolay 4y ago

WordPress is the most giant bowl of spaghetti code in existence ever! One must wonder not why the market share is shrinking but why it is still a thing! Not only it's buggy and hard to scale, but it's also costly! All the freemium plugins become very expensive! A nonprofit I was involved with had to pay thousands per year to keep an essential WooCommerce match at least 10% of the functionality of Shopify, which comes at a fraction of the price! Not to mention that WordPress still stores massive data structures as serialized arrays in single columns in old versions of MySQL, and the consistency of the data is only a matter of luck! Most plugins are written by amateurs and easily corrupt data! One such example is the famous (and expensive!) plugin GiveWP! With a very low-volume website, it kept corrupting the data. For months, their support tried to recover the data and couldn't! The typical troubleshooting suggestion for any WordPress plugin is: to disable all plugins (in Production, yeah, with a capital "P" as it's scared) and give us full admin access to the site to troubleshoot! Unfortunately, when it comes to WordPress commercial plugins, it's the typical blame-the-others game - it's never the plugin that crashes. It's the other plugins that make it crush! It's so often to see the same jQuery plugin being loaded multiple times or multiple versions of it fighting with each other because different plugin vendors use different versions! Please, do this world a favor and stop using WordPress!

ipaddr 4y ago
I have experience with both shopify and woocommerce and the difference is WooCommerce can be free if you spend the time or use free plugins. You can do anything with WooCommerce you can do somethings with shopify. Shopify has a base cost plus additional costs for anything but you can dump money on both. Most of the frameworks and open source software is written by amateurs.
- nikolay 4y ago
  All extensions have annual pricing, and WooCommerce requires expensive hosting, so Shopify is definitely cheaper and more convenient if you use their merchant service and their credit card reader, which is integrated into their inventory tracking (the WooCommerce inventory tracking is a joke, and it only kind of works if you use Square).

dbg31415 4y ago

WordPress... it's just in an odd space. Most small businesses can just use social media / menu hosting service. Larger businesses can afford real CMS tools. WordPress has gotten better in recent years, but it's still at core a "blog" platform. And frankly that makes all the themes and features either annoying duct-tapped in add-ons, or backward looking. I recently tried configuring a new site for a neighbor. And it was OK, but like... the neighbor asked for some simple things: ADA Compliance, and No User Comments anywhere. It was a hack, like it was a lot more work than it should have been to get him to the point where his theme actually worked the way he wanted it to. On top of that... like it was just tedious to get ADA Compliance with some of the themes. They didn't use ARIA tags, or have good color pickers... worse, like you'd pick the color for one font, and it would use the color in the footer or some other place. Totally frustrating. And fixing all the things needed to get the site live made sure that he would never be able to ever upgrade that theme or theme builder tool. Oof. It's very much a disposable site. One that isn't factoring in modern needs... forcing users to download add-ons instead of just having easy to customize templates for each page type build in to the core system... by default you only get Blog Post, and Page... but like I just want "Staff Bio" and "Product" and "Store Locations" and a bunch of other simple page types. In the end... I just ended up moving him over to Squarespace, where most everything just worked without any dated "must be a blog platform first" notions. Oh, and the page editor... holy hell don't get me started on how clunky WordPress' page editor is. It's gotten better... it's just not good. Feels like they are still letting volunteer developers do the UX instead of investing in real UX designers. Meh, it's free... and you get what you pay for. Eh, you actually get a huge headache with WordPress. I hate using WordPress, I can't recommend it to anyone. They need to just ditch the notion that anyone wants to use it as a blogging platform, and convert it to a CMS-first platform. Then they might have a shot.

indymike 4y ago

The problem we have is that getting traffic to a website is expensive and difficult compared to 5-10 years ago. This is really problematic for small businesses that just want traffic for search from local visits or in a niche category. Wordpress losing market ins't surprising, hosting costs money - and the choices for WP are pay wordpress dot com or get a shared hosting account like it's 2004. Facebook pages are free. Search isn't delivering traffic. Instagram, Facebook Pages, Google My Business, etc... are all making to cost of maintaining a nice website simply not worth it.

unfocused 4y ago

I’ve been managing (volunteer) a Wordpress site for 12 years now for a non-profit organization that hosts a university competition. They post about 1 or 2 times a month, and I created a registration form and email confirmation. All free. The only fees they pay are server hosting and domain name. I think we have paid on average around $40 a year. So for the past decade, they spent $500 on website fees and no ads. So I guess you can say if your goal is just to send information and don’t have a need for profit, I would say Wordpress is a good fit.

ggm 4y ago

Maybe I misread things, but this chart of market share is not declining in any real sense, its 1 percentage point variance in 43% share. So its 2% variance of their market share. Did I misread?

marc_io 4y ago
I don't think you misread. This post makes a lot of assumptions based on a small change, in a brief time frame. IMO, it's not enough to dictate that WP market share is really shrinking in any significant way just because it lost less than 1% in a few months. Let's see if the trend persist in the coming years to make statements like that.

chris_wot 4y ago

It is shrinking because they have decided to pivot to Gutenberg. What they don't realise is that there is a major cottage industry of people developing custom themes for their clients, who use things like WooCommerce for selling. These people know how Wordpress works through the old, classic system of themes but couldn't care less about block themes.

exodust 4y ago

> "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/ 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.

todotask 4y ago
In my case, I haven’t tried to optimize database that run Woocommerce, still, there is some sluggish performance need to manually remove require complicate coding. As for the anti-fraud plugin which use MaxMind database, could be worth that annual subscription compare to hire a developer and build the same backend for your business.

karaterobot 4y ago

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...

calcsam 4y ago

In March, a number of technologies that were growing quickly on W3techs suddenly went flat or declining (Shopify and WordPress are examples). Others experienced a sudden surge (Squarespace, Wix). I suspect W3techs is rolling out a change in their methodology.

skilled 4y ago

Like some already said, WordPress also paid for a lot of things in my life. And recently I was on a 3 year hiatus from the platform because of real life situation. Having been back on the saddle for the last 7 months, I do agree that FSE is an overly ambitious project that might take further 5 years to get it right. I don’t necessarily dislike it, though it doesn’t bother me either. If I want a site builder I will just use one of the established plugins. I am more annoyed that the work being done on the actual content editor is subpar at best. Some core issues that still plague it are back to top clipping, slow performance of loading media, and extremely poor integration with block plugins. But even with all the glaring issues, WordPress will remain a top choice for years to come. It’s so easy to get the site to do you want without needing to hire an agency that will leave a dent in your budget. Nice to see people like Joost step up and talk about it.

d3nj4l 4y ago

Is it just me, or is WP's new block-based editor (Gutenberg) easily the worst of its kind? I maintain a small blog for translations on WP, and each time I'm trying to do anything non-trivial it's a massive pain, with obvious and infuriating UI bugs and glitches. I've seriously been considering switching to self-hosted SSG, but many of the people I work with aren't all that familiar with Markdown or Git to be able to do that well enough.

etchalon 4y ago

Gutenberg is not a good product, and while I understand why it exists, it feels absolutely ridiculous that the WordPress team keeps charging ahead with it.

nakitatibbs22 4y ago

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pmlnr 4y ago
> For example you render with php and then you have some jquery that gives interaction. Yes, that is how we (used to) do things: look up progressive enhancements.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ufmace 4y ago

Maybe I've gotten something wrong here, but as far as I can tell, Wix and Squarespace are entirely closed-source hosted solutions. This might be a small and hard to verify decline, but it still makes me kind of sad to see more things moving from something you at least can host yourself if you want to something entirely proprietary. Wordpress may have its warts, but you can still actually get the code, and it still works mostly okay and can easily be hosted yourself in a wide variety of ways. If you want to hack it to do something weird or crazy, you actually can. IMO that beats locking everything into some company's system that you may not be able to extract or change.

grassmudhorse 4y ago

> this is, after all, a zero sum game. No it isn't. Lost me here.

zerop 4y ago

Buddypress's commercial fork, buddyboss, is doing better than Buddypress. Any users of Buddyboss, need reviews as i am planning to use it for a community project.

ravivyas 4y ago

Contrarian View: The CMS market is expanding. Notes from the post - The %is actually growing, ~41% to ~43%, minor drops in the last few months The large point is how the CMS market has diversified, which is evident from the fact that the next largest player is Shopify at ~4%. CMS is too broad a term which envelops personal blogs to E-commerce. The challenge Wordpress will have in the long run is trying to do everything for everyone and not being the best at anything.

chupchap 4y ago

Who's still using Alexa? The quality of data is only as good as the people using the service. I haven't seen a single person who uses Alexa as a plugin or as a service in ages so I don't know how to treat this data. The only companies with a legit data would be search engines and browsers.

cheeseface 4y ago

This is not surprising. The WordPress scene is super confusing right now. I spent almost 5 years building WordPress websites professionally and stopped a few years go. If I would need to build a WordPress site today, I would not know if I should start. Even the themes at WordPress.com (the hosted "user-friendly" version) have wildly different editing experiences.

radium3d 4y ago

The glitchy / beta (alpha?) level performance testing tools introduced by Google in the last two years have also been contributing to the lower scores and the constant changing of the scoring metrics has not helped developers such as myself get a strong hold on what Google wants. We are just now within the last 6 months really getting a strong foothold on things like CLS when using page builder plugins such as SiteOrigin Page Builder. They added a features in October last year that really knocks the CLS to zero and we've seen mobile scores way up in the 90-100 range now. WordPress can perform well with a well implemented caching system such as the one WPEngine setup on Google Cloud.

NGRhodes 4y ago

I'm continuing to use my own blogs/websites (not as much as social media, as much as an information store for myself as for my tiny audiences, not monetised) as an insurance; we have zero control over the data we post on any popular social media platform. One day it could suddenly disappear for a number of reasons - technical fault, decision by the platform provider, interference by the authorities, malicious destruction etc...

tux2bsd 4y ago

Wordpress is a cunt, it is fundamentally flawed in its design. The amount of hoop jumping to change the URL of a site is fucking insane (the site's URL is strewn all throughout the database...). A sane framework might specify the URL(s) once in a config file and/or DB field, but ultimately leaving that side to the web server configuration where it belongs. After that you can get into all the other issues people are talking about already.

sidlls 4y ago

Most users of WordPress would be better served by a static site generator system. Unfortunately, it seems most of these are very much "by developers, for developers" in flavor. They're overly complicated and insufficiently developed in the front-end to be useful to most of WordPress' current target market (e.g., businesses with a need to present mostly static content, but with the ability to make changes and deploy/publish them without too much technical know-how required).

sofixa 4y ago
WordPress can be used as a static site generator via the Simply Statuc plugin. It needs some thought into the design ( which plugins won't work because it isn't dynamic anymore), but it's a decent way of having the UX for non-developers/other very technical folk while having the security, stability, deployability and maintainability of static hosting.
- stefanos82 4y ago
  You do realize that this whole concept is an overkill, don't you? Just think about it: you need to have installed PHP, MySQL / MariaDB, and a plugin to generate static content, whereas with a SSG that exists you go straight to the phase of generating your content. Personally I plan to use Hugo for tiny to small websites that get updated once in a blue moon and for more complicated websites, I have many options to choose from; for sure WordPress is not one of them and that's a fact!
  - sofixa 4y ago
    Of course it's overkill, but i prefer that than to "force" marketing and adjacent people to learn Markdown and maybe even HTML/CSS ( at least the basics). My own website is built with Hugo, but based on my experience building WordPress websites and helping friends "using" them with basic HTML/CSS tips i wouldn't recommend that for everyone.
    - stefanos82 4y ago

vatotemking 4y ago

WordPress plugins (and themes) are plagued by freemium versions. SEO has been gamed. Gone are the days of finding a non-freemium, single functionality plugin, that just works. You have to be a seasoned WP developer to wade thru all the crap that is the WP ecosystem, or if all else fails, write your own functionality via functions.php.

rambojazz 4y ago

0.4% is like a rounding error, or normal variability. They should present data from years ago.

rograndom 4y ago

There was a ramp up of new WordPress and specifically WooCommerce sites starting in late summer of 2020 and spiking huge in December 2020 & January 2021. These are people that were stuck at home due to lockdown or losing their jobs and they started online businesses. The lot of those signed up for 1 or 2 year hosting plans and those came due around Feburary/March of this year. A large amount of those businesses failed, or the owners went back to work, etc etc, and no longer need their sites.

Yabood 4y ago
This is a plausible explanation considering that the drop in market share is not that big. It would be interesting to compare the numbers from the past two years.

Giorgi 4y ago

>losing 0.4% market share since February Seriously? 0.4% is what article calls "shrinking"

pessimizer 4y ago
Facebook lost 25% of its stock price in February from the announcement that it had lost 500K daily users out of 1.93 billion. That's 0.025%.
- Giorgi 4y ago
  Yeah it was way more than just losing 500k daily users

calltrak 4y ago