20 ms·

Do any startups still use WordPress after 20 years?

96 points by catsarebetter 3y ago

paulpauper 3y ago
WordPress is great for finding site and hosting/config vulnerabilities, which you can fix and then delete WordPress. it's like outsourcing for free a bug bounty.
- catsarebetter 3y ago
  Could you link me some info about this? I'd like to update the article with this ^
  - hoofhearted 3y ago
    Could I spare a minute of your time and ask you to check out the side project that I have been working on? We're ironing out the wrinkles and building content, but I am planning an offical SHOW HN very soon to get the communities feedback. I contacted dang and Hacker News last year because I noticed how fragmented the content space was, despite there being so much frontend innovation the last few years. WordPress is still the leading CMS platform, and I have validated this a few different ways this year myself with different data sources. I did a deep dive quantitative analysis last year on what popular startups were using for content, and the results were surprising. They either were using a WordPress instance on a subdomain, seperated from their core code base; or they had rolled their own code, and had a funky setup. From the top of my head: - stripe.com had a crazy good static powered website. 100% not WordPress lol - opensea.io had a core Next.js application, but had an older WordPress instance for blogging on a sub-domain. - paulgraham.com has a super dated custom setup.. Even though he writes the best essays, I can't read them easily on my phone :( - patrickcollison.com is something simple and basic as PG's, just not as dated. - ycombinator.com has some janky "React on Rails" setup. From that point, the quick and rapid startups who were gaining traction either figured out how to create content alongside their app.. Or they used Webflow and didn't create any sort of seamless and simple docs, users guides, blogs, etc. I ended up eventually emailing YC directly to ask them why things were so wonky in the content space like this. I asked them why they would spend the resources to use Ruby to talk to a webserver and database to get basic static text. I also asked why PG's website was in the state that it was in, and if he would consider an upgrade if it existed. To my surprise, I actually got a speedy response back from Daniel himself. He gave me a ton of feedback and told me that Paul probably wouldn't be interested. He then said that if I was able to put together something impressive, I should do a SHOW HN because this is a large problem space. I'd love to connect with you and get your feedback, and share any ideas or data. My email address is in my bio if you want to connect :) https://github.com/elegantframework/elegant-cli https://github.com/elegantframework/elegant-cli Live Demo: https://www.elegantframework.com/ https://www.elegantframework.com/
    - devteambravo 3y ago
      Nice branding. Any relations to Elegant Themes/Divi?
      - hoofhearted 3y ago
        Hey thank you for the kind words! Nope, no relation at all :) Taylor Otwell’s coding style has been very influential on me, and I’ve used a number of his concepts to get this project rolling in just a few months. His code is “expressive, elegant syntax.”
- robotnikman 3y ago
  Hah! I laughed too hard at this.
appleaday1 3y ago
Its a good honeypot.
ramesh31 3y ago
I'm certain there are still endless amounts of little lifestyle businesses out there doing a few million in revenue on the same WP installation they've been configuring since 2011. I know because I built them back then and literally nothing has actually changed. I honestly can't say I'd reccomend anything else to someone intent on self hosting even today.
- catsarebetter 3y ago
  It's hard to argue against the technology that's been around forever. Have you tried new tech recently ie. Vercel?
- icelancer 3y ago
  Yep. Mine does. Works fine.
JohnFen 3y ago
I don't. I dropped Wordpress years ago, because I got tired of dealing with all of the security problems.
- donohoe 3y ago
  I am guessing the issues were mostly plugin related, thats the main vector and where people get sloppy by installing unvetted code.
  - aidos 3y ago
    Unfortunately eventually everyone gives in to the marketing team installing plugins. And to be fair, they’re just trying to do their job and you get sick of saying no. We all know how it ends though…it’s a sea of issues waiting to happen.
    - donohoe 3y ago
      Not everyone :)
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Yes, but Wordpress is substantially less useful if you avoid using plugins. I dropped wordpress because it was more effort than it was worth to deal with the issue.
    - donohoe 3y ago
      I wouldn't avoid plugins, I'd just be very careful about which ones you allow. There are several ones that are good-to-go and I'd use in any standard instance. Beyond that, code review!
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        > I'd just be very careful about which ones you allow. I did my best to do that, but it still required far more maintenance than I was willing to put into it. > Beyond that, code review! Yeah, no, that would take even more of my resources! Really, I'm not saying "WP sucks" or anything. It just required a lot more time and attention than it was worth to me, personally.
syntheticnature 3y ago
This seems like a bit of the perennially-linked "Choose Boring Technology" bit. Your corporate landing page/blog is unlikely to need anything fancy. This is true especially if you aren't in tech, while the article focuses on YC startups, so a tech subset of (or subset of tech) startups. The categories listed do seem most likely to be cases where there isn't much need for anything fancy on the website front.
- catsarebetter 3y ago
  I chose YC startups bc they tend to be locked into early technology trends specifically bc 1. everyone tries them out on each other and 2. they need to leverage every advantage to make great product, being a tech early adopter is one of them. It's true, choosing boring tech works. I analyzed some data to show that most YC companies in the last few years prefer Webflow by far. They seem to prefer it for their marketing sites. But I do think that it's impressive that some people in this tech-obsessed niche chose WP still.
  - lobochrome 3y ago
    Never heard of Webflow before. My god 11 years old. 335M$ funding. 600+ employees. Not public. How on earth would you make a call to rely on something like this? All the runway they might have had last summer will end soon…
    - bnchrch 3y ago
      > Never heard of Webflow before. Have you been living under a rock? Not trying to be cheeky but its been the only tool brought up in the conversation of "what should we use for our marketing website" for the better part of 5 years. edit: Their pricing can become outrageous, Ive heard of some companies paying five figures a year for their Webflow CMS, for multiple years. So I dont think their last raise is the only money in that bank account
      - ipaddr 3y ago
        I've never heard of it either. Might be more popular in the uk.
koromak 3y ago
Yes. Keep the real application on a subdomain, and make your marketing website a simple wordpress install. Minimal effort, and works great if you don't care about authorization / integration between the two.
- kerblang 3y ago
  Worked at a company that combined the two, which eventually led to half the dev team working for... the marketing dept. It was a horrible mess.
  - anotherhue 3y ago
    Yup, I've seen that. Catastrophic.
  - ssss11 3y ago
    Reminds me of when IT reported to Supply Chain in a company I was at. For some strange reason supporting supply chain systems and initiatives made up 60% of our work…
    - ethbr0 3y ago
      To be fair, Supply Chain is 60% of a lot of companies' value.
      - ssss11 3y ago
        This was retail so we also had all the POS store systems, finance systems of course, payroll, collaboration (email, SharePoint and so on..)
        ethbr0 3y ago
        I figured it was retail from the capital letters. ;) And not diminishing the other components, but my understanding of retail at scale from working corporate for a moment shifted to "Supply Chain is where profit is made or lost: everything else is follow-through."
kylecazar 3y ago
I've noticed some which only offer an app use WP for their basic web presence/brand landing page.
frizlab 3y ago
Yes we do in (both) my startups. And I know a friend who does too. Interestingly we’re actually coming back to WP after a time w/o it!
- catsarebetter 3y ago
  Interesting! What kind of products are you building and what were the tradeoffs that you made with other similar tools?
  - frizlab 3y ago
    It’s both mobile apps; we use WP for the marketing website. The other tool we used was Django but we do not have anybody left in the company who knows how it works, the software is outdate: it was easier to simply remake the website using WP (we also re-designed it).
    - catsarebetter 3y ago
      Makes sense! Let me know if you ever need someone who knows (and loves!) Django.
EGreg 3y ago
We use it: https://rational.app https://rational.app https://teaching.app https://teaching.app Just as two examples
donutshop 3y ago
WordPress? That's too simple. We use a static webpage, served up through kubernetes.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  WordPress is a CMS, but it doesn't have to also your site runtime. Many people use WordPress as an SSG using tools like Simply Static.
- devoutsalsa 3y ago
  Coming soon, running Kubernetes as a Wordpress plugin.
  - donutshop 3y ago
    - to help you ship faster!
donohoe 3y ago
At one point The New Yorker, with its 90 year archive, was on WordPress. It only moved off that because Conde Nast (parent company) had their own CMS and wanted to unify what all their brands used. Many publishers (large and small) use it quite reliably at an enterprise level.
- nkozyra 3y ago
  > Many publishers (large and small) use it quite reliably at an enterprise level. Not out of the box, and the things they have to do to make it scale would make most devs cry. I've seen it up close and personal. WordPress out of the box is good for a low traffic blog. Even then it's not well designed software.
  - donohoe 3y ago
    Going to 100% disagree with you there. My team did the migration and build-out of The New Yorker and its relaunch on WordPress. I launched Quartz (qz.com) originally on WordPress (acquired and moved to in-house CMS then at G/O Media), and other media orgs since then. Sure, not "out of the box" but not the way you mean. There was a design to be put in place, but no more than any other CMS... If your devs are being made to cry then you are doing it wrong?
    - nkozyra 3y ago
      > Sure, not "out of the box" but not the way you mean. There was a design to be put in place, but no more than any other CMS... That's pretty much what I mean. Most CMS platforms on high traffic sites need caching, but not to the extent WordPress needs to be buffered. I've seen some ugly stuff that was solved very quickly by using a more robust CMS. I suspect you have too. There are advantages to it for a newsroom but not enough to make me ever consider reaching for it in 2023. > If your devs are being made to cry then you are doing it wrong? I disagree with this. If I make people use the wrong tool then I'm doing it wrong.
      - donohoe 3y ago
yawnxyz 3y ago
Does anyone use Headless Wordpress here? It's been quiet since they launched that, and I've never used it but it sounds like a good option for those who never really learned PHP
- karaterobot 3y ago
  I did some consulting work for a name-brand online retailer who uses headless WordPress for managing at least some of their content. I didn't work on it to the level where I know all the places it touched, though.
poomer 3y ago
Quite a few do - here is databricks https://www.databricks.com/ https://www.databricks.com/
singingfish 3y ago
we were looking at this the other day while trying to assess what the standard tools are for ecommerce these days. We were using google trends. There is still a lot of interest in wordpress, compared to say joomla which had its day in the sun but is now on the way out. However there seems to be a big move towards people using more SAAS (e.g. your broucure site being instagram) and less maintaining your own kit. Also anecdote: my sax repair guy is moving off woocommerce onto an offering provided by his PoS vendor. PoS integration is also quite common - a local non profit I'm involved in also does this.
- catsarebetter 3y ago
  If you want, you can email me with a few ecommerce domains. I can generate some data and send you a report with the custom tech I used for this article.
  - singingfish 3y ago
    Not really relevant to our problem tbh. At our scale (b2b) the answer seems to be there's a big trend away from places owning their own IP and using partnerships instead. Which is a problem when your competitive advantage is closely linked to owning your own IP, as it's hard to get external partners to advise you well in a way that's going to get the dev team and the execs aligned. However there have been many attempts to kill our code over the years, all of which has been unsuccessful to date because someone's got to route around the horrors of the ERP and the rest of the enterprise stack.
    - catsarebetter 3y ago
      Agh we're facing the same problem at my job, build vs buy conversation a long time ago that resulted in a buy decision that we're suffering from. Even worse is no one involved in that decision is around today
      - singingfish 3y ago
        The fact that our competitors don't own their IP makes writing the occasional price scraping bot much easier, and has the knock on effect that there is likely a lack of people that care what I'm doing inside the competitors. The link between business process and customer activity is quite tricky to codify in our case, and it's a substantial source of value because it creates high availability in a less-than-robust system and gives a single point of entry to how the management of business processes links to outcomes. Currently we're pushing the org to avoid complete rebuild and go for targeted rebuild where the old and new systems can share common functionality / features can get backported. It's not the standard type of work that partners do though, so that's tricky.
o_____________o 3y ago
Recently tried Wordpress again, thinking maybe it has matured. Terrible idea, terrible platform. For example, you want metadata on posts, you install ACF. You want to filter on that metadata, good luck if it's over a couple filters simultaneously, the SQL queries will time out. You're guaranteed to need different tweaks that get dumped into a scripts file, feels like patterns from 20 years ago. There are some people trying to untangle the Wordpress trash pile by refactoring and bolting Laravel onto it[1], but every layer is just a nightmare; the authors of different parts can barely assess why things randomly break. You might find WP appealing for the plugin ecosystem, but the plugins are completely random in implementation, so you're likely to get a bloated scramble of CSS and JS pushed to your users. I moved to Directus and Astro, but I would probably use a Laravel-based CMS like October or Statamic for more generalized PHP deployment. [1]: https://roots.io/ https://roots.io/
PeterCorless 3y ago
I used WordPress at my last job. We don't at my new job and I miss it terribly.
WheelsAtLarge 3y ago
Wordpress has value in its ability to get a site up very quickly. If I, one person, want to, I can get a pretty professional site up in a day. That's a powerful. I can then come back to it later and improve it given my needs. Startups are all about limited resources and Wordpress is a good tool to use. What's a better alternative?
- hoofhearted 3y ago
  How do you feel about this? https://www.elegantframework.com/ https://www.elegantframework.com/ It's literally a React based alternative to WordPress, built with Next.js and Tailwind CSS. An offical launch here and SHOW HN is coming soon :) I'm able to create and launch a professional website in only just a few minutes, complete with users docs and a blog. It has a near perfect Lighthouse score, and already crushes wordpress.com in all the SEO areas.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    Your missing some key pieces. What databases are supported? What does the schema look like? Is there an api? Why can't I try it out?
    - hoofhearted 3y ago
      Yes! Thank you for the feedback. This was just a simple idea and concept that dang encouraged me to prototype an MVP for. The concept has been receiving really great feedback, and the project is progressing way faster than I had imagined. The project is still in it's infancy, but the market is helping to drive the rapid developement. Everything you mentioned above is in discussion or active development: https://github.com/orgs/elegantframework/discussions/49#discussioncomment-6065438 https://github.com/orgs/elegantframework/discussions/49#disc...
- herbst 3y ago
  That's no real reason. If I use a bootstrap template and some rails magic I have the same professional site up just as fast but I don't hinder my future success trough a security nightmare, a overly complicated framework and super slow rendering times.
throwaway106382 3y ago
[dead]
pacifika 3y ago
The article misspells the product
ttul 3y ago
WordPress is dominant because it's the Lingua Franca of the web design world. Despite PHP sucking, WordPress is well known by everyone in the industry and competitors - even with far superior technology - have an impossible task disrupting something with such platform dominance. For comparison, Microsoft Windows still holds about 75% market share, a figure that has barely budged in the last five years, despite Apple making major inroads. https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...
xp84 3y ago
I beg of you, if you use Wordpress, and don’t have some reason you can’t do this: Use a static site generator plugin for Wordpress, host it completely behind IP restrictions or firewall rules, for only whoever needs to actually update it. The static site plugin will regenerate/update plain HTML files out of your WP instance whenever you tell it to; then it transfers those to your location of choice where they’ll just be hosted statically. Wordpress is a pile of garbage from a security standpoint and having it exposed to the internet is basically asking to be hacked constantly by spammers and script kiddies. But it is useful as an easy content generation tool anyone can use, and at the cadence most people actually update it, the regeneration compute time is trivial.
- pacifika 3y ago
  Not sure why this is the top comment. Set the permissions to read only and update via composer
  - burnte 3y ago
    Agreed, Wordpress is one of the leading CMSs, and with proper security it's fine. Any half-baked cache app will do what this commenter recommends anyway. Some people still irrationally hate PHP and WP.
    - javchz 3y ago
      In my experience the vas majority of security attacks to WP sites are plugin related. But blaming WP and php for that is like bashing linux for users installing random binary files with sudo.
      - burnte 3y ago
        Precisely my point as well. Everything is bad when done poorly. :D
  - xp84 3y ago
    Seems like a lot of work to still have a slow site, wasting tons of CPU to dynamically generate a site when most such sites stay static for days to months. Yes, you can probably install cache plugins to work around this but everyone is pointing out how you have to be super careful with plugins. If you don’t need a super dynamic site, Wordpress exposed to the Internet is an unnecessary choice. And it does have 0-days sometimes, so just “being perfect about updating, and knowing what plugins are trash and avoiding them” isn’t 100% adequate to keep your WP site secure.
nologic01 3y ago
Any tech that lasts this long has some serious mojo. Was checking out the SSG scene and with the exception of a couple of gems its a loud, confused buzzword cacophony screaming for attention.
gumballindie 3y ago
> Still, pretty impressive market penetration in a world that now has reliable generative AI and serverless lambda functions with 2 min deploys like Vercel and Netlify. Huh? What’s the link between generative ai and the need for a wp like tool? Or indeed lambda functions? Does the author think that _everyone_ is using aws?
- ilamont 3y ago
  SEO keyword stuffing strikes again.
uzername 3y ago
I don't mind WordPress. My company doesn't use it for its marketing sites though, prefers larger more monolithic enterprise options. But it's not a startup either. From what I heard WordPress was not favored because maintenance was difficult (plugins, vulnerabilities, upgrades) and also there was uncertainty about gpl. A while ago some startups I worked were using webflow and instapage for their marketing sites.
iJohnDoe 3y ago
Why wouldn’t you? Great platform to get a site up and running quickly. MVP.
devhead 3y ago
for my company we still see it in use after all these years and countless security incidents because it's just left there. I could not personally ever imagine wanting to install that and thinking it's a good thing. Recently I have had to help restore one that was completely infected, before we acquired the business. The amount of BS that still is exactly the same as it was the last time i was forced to manage WP in the early 2000's is insane. I get the draw, I just don't agree with it and would never openly advocate for it to be considered. Every reason to not use it can be excused if you want to make an excuse for it or do something different with it, but at the end of the day it's dated and offers more headache and pain than any usefulness of it as a tool in hosting a site. Here's some of my bug A boos... - Doesn't scale - Wants open permissions on files - Wants you to use plugins - Exposes services it doesn't need to expose - Hardcode's FQDN in links and resources, and everything it can - Defaults to be the dumbest install settings to make it "easy" for everyone - Debugging is still a nightmare - Logging is not consistent - Maintains state on a machine, preventing you from scaling or high availability - Codebase has no real framework to extend and use, preference on adding your own bad code to it in order to make it work. - Does not work well with CI/CD automations - Is a huge target of vulnerability scanners - Page updates use a huge post size that is expensive to inspect w/firewall - Making changes can and will take your site down - Lets you modify a template file from the gui, but only the first directory level, making you still need to push changes to underlying files in a template. - Performance is a joke - Problem with a plugin can crash the full site - SQL injection is still a significant problem again, i know someone can rationalize them all away; you are putting in a ton of work that you could have done otherwise with a better solution and not have the ongoing limitations and nightmare associated with it. If you run it, you should consider it to already be hacked and move accordingly. Often times i hear the argument, well there's nothing i need on there so it's not a security risk...i think your customers would dissagree when they start getting infected with crypto miners, clicking affilitate links that aren't yours, linking to malware, viewing content you didn't add, downloading files that are dangerous, using your hacked system to attack others, and on and on. edit: format
barbariangrunge 3y ago
Anybody use ghost? How do you find that?
XCSme 3y ago
Yes, it's usually a one-click install and comes with an easy way to switch between themes, can give access to others to write content (editors) and you can easily get extra goodies on the same installation like contact forms, newsletters, reservation systems, e-commerce, etc.
droobles 3y ago
No, not since around 2017. I personally use Jekyll now for all my startup-y websites.

96 points by catsarebetter 3y ago

WordPress is great for finding site and hosting/config vulnerabilities, which you can fix and then delete WordPress. it's like outsourcing for free a bug bounty.

catsarebetter 3y ago
Could you link me some info about this? I'd like to update the article with this ^
- hoofhearted 3y ago
  Could I spare a minute of your time and ask you to check out the side project that I have been working on? We're ironing out the wrinkles and building content, but I am planning an offical SHOW HN very soon to get the communities feedback. I contacted dang and Hacker News last year because I noticed how fragmented the content space was, despite there being so much frontend innovation the last few years. WordPress is still the leading CMS platform, and I have validated this a few different ways this year myself with different data sources. I did a deep dive quantitative analysis last year on what popular startups were using for content, and the results were surprising. They either were using a WordPress instance on a subdomain, seperated from their core code base; or they had rolled their own code, and had a funky setup. From the top of my head: - stripe.com had a crazy good static powered website. 100% not WordPress lol - opensea.io had a core Next.js application, but had an older WordPress instance for blogging on a sub-domain. - paulgraham.com has a super dated custom setup.. Even though he writes the best essays, I can't read them easily on my phone :( - patrickcollison.com is something simple and basic as PG's, just not as dated. - ycombinator.com has some janky "React on Rails" setup. From that point, the quick and rapid startups who were gaining traction either figured out how to create content alongside their app.. Or they used Webflow and didn't create any sort of seamless and simple docs, users guides, blogs, etc. I ended up eventually emailing YC directly to ask them why things were so wonky in the content space like this. I asked them why they would spend the resources to use Ruby to talk to a webserver and database to get basic static text. I also asked why PG's website was in the state that it was in, and if he would consider an upgrade if it existed. To my surprise, I actually got a speedy response back from Daniel himself. He gave me a ton of feedback and told me that Paul probably wouldn't be interested. He then said that if I was able to put together something impressive, I should do a SHOW HN because this is a large problem space. I'd love to connect with you and get your feedback, and share any ideas or data. My email address is in my bio if you want to connect :) https://github.com/elegantframework/elegant-cli https://github.com/elegantframework/elegant-cli Live Demo: https://www.elegantframework.com/ https://www.elegantframework.com/
  - devteambravo 3y ago
    Nice branding. Any relations to Elegant Themes/Divi?
    - hoofhearted 3y ago
      Hey thank you for the kind words! Nope, no relation at all :) Taylor Otwell’s coding style has been very influential on me, and I’ve used a number of his concepts to get this project rolling in just a few months. His code is “expressive, elegant syntax.”
robotnikman 3y ago
Hah! I laughed too hard at this.

appleaday1 3y ago

Its a good honeypot.

ramesh31 3y ago

I'm certain there are still endless amounts of little lifestyle businesses out there doing a few million in revenue on the same WP installation they've been configuring since 2011. I know because I built them back then and literally nothing has actually changed. I honestly can't say I'd reccomend anything else to someone intent on self hosting even today.

catsarebetter 3y ago
It's hard to argue against the technology that's been around forever. Have you tried new tech recently ie. Vercel?
icelancer 3y ago
Yep. Mine does. Works fine.

JohnFen 3y ago

I don't. I dropped Wordpress years ago, because I got tired of dealing with all of the security problems.

donohoe 3y ago
I am guessing the issues were mostly plugin related, thats the main vector and where people get sloppy by installing unvetted code.
- aidos 3y ago
  Unfortunately eventually everyone gives in to the marketing team installing plugins. And to be fair, they’re just trying to do their job and you get sick of saying no. We all know how it ends though…it’s a sea of issues waiting to happen.
  - donohoe 3y ago
    Not everyone :)
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Yes, but Wordpress is substantially less useful if you avoid using plugins. I dropped wordpress because it was more effort than it was worth to deal with the issue.
  - donohoe 3y ago
    I wouldn't avoid plugins, I'd just be very careful about which ones you allow. There are several ones that are good-to-go and I'd use in any standard instance. Beyond that, code review!
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > I'd just be very careful about which ones you allow. I did my best to do that, but it still required far more maintenance than I was willing to put into it. > Beyond that, code review! Yeah, no, that would take even more of my resources! Really, I'm not saying "WP sucks" or anything. It just required a lot more time and attention than it was worth to me, personally.

syntheticnature 3y ago

This seems like a bit of the perennially-linked "Choose Boring Technology" bit. Your corporate landing page/blog is unlikely to need anything fancy. This is true especially if you aren't in tech, while the article focuses on YC startups, so a tech subset of (or subset of tech) startups. The categories listed do seem most likely to be cases where there isn't much need for anything fancy on the website front.

catsarebetter 3y ago
I chose YC startups bc they tend to be locked into early technology trends specifically bc 1. everyone tries them out on each other and 2. they need to leverage every advantage to make great product, being a tech early adopter is one of them. It's true, choosing boring tech works. I analyzed some data to show that most YC companies in the last few years prefer Webflow by far. They seem to prefer it for their marketing sites. But I do think that it's impressive that some people in this tech-obsessed niche chose WP still.
- lobochrome 3y ago
  Never heard of Webflow before. My god 11 years old. 335M$ funding. 600+ employees. Not public. How on earth would you make a call to rely on something like this? All the runway they might have had last summer will end soon…
  - bnchrch 3y ago
    > Never heard of Webflow before. Have you been living under a rock? Not trying to be cheeky but its been the only tool brought up in the conversation of "what should we use for our marketing website" for the better part of 5 years. edit: Their pricing can become outrageous, Ive heard of some companies paying five figures a year for their Webflow CMS, for multiple years. So I dont think their last raise is the only money in that bank account
    - ipaddr 3y ago
      I've never heard of it either. Might be more popular in the uk.

koromak 3y ago

Yes. Keep the real application on a subdomain, and make your marketing website a simple wordpress install. Minimal effort, and works great if you don't care about authorization / integration between the two.

kerblang 3y ago
Worked at a company that combined the two, which eventually led to half the dev team working for... the marketing dept. It was a horrible mess.
- anotherhue 3y ago
  Yup, I've seen that. Catastrophic.
- ssss11 3y ago
  Reminds me of when IT reported to Supply Chain in a company I was at. For some strange reason supporting supply chain systems and initiatives made up 60% of our work…
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    To be fair, Supply Chain is 60% of a lot of companies' value.
    - ssss11 3y ago
      This was retail so we also had all the POS store systems, finance systems of course, payroll, collaboration (email, SharePoint and so on..)
      - ethbr0 3y ago
        I figured it was retail from the capital letters. ;) And not diminishing the other components, but my understanding of retail at scale from working corporate for a moment shifted to "Supply Chain is where profit is made or lost: everything else is follow-through."

kylecazar 3y ago

I've noticed some which only offer an app use WP for their basic web presence/brand landing page.

frizlab 3y ago

Yes we do in (both) my startups. And I know a friend who does too. Interestingly we’re actually coming back to WP after a time w/o it!

catsarebetter 3y ago
Interesting! What kind of products are you building and what were the tradeoffs that you made with other similar tools?
- frizlab 3y ago
  It’s both mobile apps; we use WP for the marketing website. The other tool we used was Django but we do not have anybody left in the company who knows how it works, the software is outdate: it was easier to simply remake the website using WP (we also re-designed it).
  - catsarebetter 3y ago
    Makes sense! Let me know if you ever need someone who knows (and loves!) Django.

EGreg 3y ago

We use it: https://rational.app https://rational.app https://teaching.app https://teaching.app Just as two examples

donutshop 3y ago

WordPress? That's too simple. We use a static webpage, served up through kubernetes.

CharlesW 3y ago
WordPress is a CMS, but it doesn't have to also your site runtime. Many people use WordPress as an SSG using tools like Simply Static.
devoutsalsa 3y ago
Coming soon, running Kubernetes as a Wordpress plugin.
- donutshop 3y ago
  - to help you ship faster!

donohoe 3y ago

At one point The New Yorker, with its 90 year archive, was on WordPress. It only moved off that because Conde Nast (parent company) had their own CMS and wanted to unify what all their brands used. Many publishers (large and small) use it quite reliably at an enterprise level.

nkozyra 3y ago
> Many publishers (large and small) use it quite reliably at an enterprise level. Not out of the box, and the things they have to do to make it scale would make most devs cry. I've seen it up close and personal. WordPress out of the box is good for a low traffic blog. Even then it's not well designed software.
- donohoe 3y ago
  Going to 100% disagree with you there. My team did the migration and build-out of The New Yorker and its relaunch on WordPress. I launched Quartz (qz.com) originally on WordPress (acquired and moved to in-house CMS then at G/O Media), and other media orgs since then. Sure, not "out of the box" but not the way you mean. There was a design to be put in place, but no more than any other CMS... If your devs are being made to cry then you are doing it wrong?
  - nkozyra 3y ago
    > Sure, not "out of the box" but not the way you mean. There was a design to be put in place, but no more than any other CMS... That's pretty much what I mean. Most CMS platforms on high traffic sites need caching, but not to the extent WordPress needs to be buffered. I've seen some ugly stuff that was solved very quickly by using a more robust CMS. I suspect you have too. There are advantages to it for a newsroom but not enough to make me ever consider reaching for it in 2023. > If your devs are being made to cry then you are doing it wrong? I disagree with this. If I make people use the wrong tool then I'm doing it wrong.
    - donohoe 3y ago

yawnxyz 3y ago

Does anyone use Headless Wordpress here? It's been quiet since they launched that, and I've never used it but it sounds like a good option for those who never really learned PHP

karaterobot 3y ago
I did some consulting work for a name-brand online retailer who uses headless WordPress for managing at least some of their content. I didn't work on it to the level where I know all the places it touched, though.

poomer 3y ago

Quite a few do - here is databricks https://www.databricks.com/ https://www.databricks.com/

singingfish 3y ago

we were looking at this the other day while trying to assess what the standard tools are for ecommerce these days. We were using google trends. There is still a lot of interest in wordpress, compared to say joomla which had its day in the sun but is now on the way out. However there seems to be a big move towards people using more SAAS (e.g. your broucure site being instagram) and less maintaining your own kit. Also anecdote: my sax repair guy is moving off woocommerce onto an offering provided by his PoS vendor. PoS integration is also quite common - a local non profit I'm involved in also does this.

catsarebetter 3y ago
If you want, you can email me with a few ecommerce domains. I can generate some data and send you a report with the custom tech I used for this article.
- singingfish 3y ago
  Not really relevant to our problem tbh. At our scale (b2b) the answer seems to be there's a big trend away from places owning their own IP and using partnerships instead. Which is a problem when your competitive advantage is closely linked to owning your own IP, as it's hard to get external partners to advise you well in a way that's going to get the dev team and the execs aligned. However there have been many attempts to kill our code over the years, all of which has been unsuccessful to date because someone's got to route around the horrors of the ERP and the rest of the enterprise stack.
  - catsarebetter 3y ago
    Agh we're facing the same problem at my job, build vs buy conversation a long time ago that resulted in a buy decision that we're suffering from. Even worse is no one involved in that decision is around today
    - singingfish 3y ago
      The fact that our competitors don't own their IP makes writing the occasional price scraping bot much easier, and has the knock on effect that there is likely a lack of people that care what I'm doing inside the competitors. The link between business process and customer activity is quite tricky to codify in our case, and it's a substantial source of value because it creates high availability in a less-than-robust system and gives a single point of entry to how the management of business processes links to outcomes. Currently we're pushing the org to avoid complete rebuild and go for targeted rebuild where the old and new systems can share common functionality / features can get backported. It's not the standard type of work that partners do though, so that's tricky.

o_____________o 3y ago

Recently tried Wordpress again, thinking maybe it has matured. Terrible idea, terrible platform. For example, you want metadata on posts, you install ACF. You want to filter on that metadata, good luck if it's over a couple filters simultaneously, the SQL queries will time out. You're guaranteed to need different tweaks that get dumped into a scripts file, feels like patterns from 20 years ago. There are some people trying to untangle the Wordpress trash pile by refactoring and bolting Laravel onto it[1], but every layer is just a nightmare; the authors of different parts can barely assess why things randomly break. You might find WP appealing for the plugin ecosystem, but the plugins are completely random in implementation, so you're likely to get a bloated scramble of CSS and JS pushed to your users. I moved to Directus and Astro, but I would probably use a Laravel-based CMS like October or Statamic for more generalized PHP deployment. [1]: https://roots.io/ https://roots.io/

PeterCorless 3y ago

I used WordPress at my last job. We don't at my new job and I miss it terribly.

WheelsAtLarge 3y ago

Wordpress has value in its ability to get a site up very quickly. If I, one person, want to, I can get a pretty professional site up in a day. That's a powerful. I can then come back to it later and improve it given my needs. Startups are all about limited resources and Wordpress is a good tool to use. What's a better alternative?

hoofhearted 3y ago
How do you feel about this? https://www.elegantframework.com/ https://www.elegantframework.com/ It's literally a React based alternative to WordPress, built with Next.js and Tailwind CSS. An offical launch here and SHOW HN is coming soon :) I'm able to create and launch a professional website in only just a few minutes, complete with users docs and a blog. It has a near perfect Lighthouse score, and already crushes wordpress.com in all the SEO areas.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  Your missing some key pieces. What databases are supported? What does the schema look like? Is there an api? Why can't I try it out?
  - hoofhearted 3y ago
    Yes! Thank you for the feedback. This was just a simple idea and concept that dang encouraged me to prototype an MVP for. The concept has been receiving really great feedback, and the project is progressing way faster than I had imagined. The project is still in it's infancy, but the market is helping to drive the rapid developement. Everything you mentioned above is in discussion or active development: https://github.com/orgs/elegantframework/discussions/49#discussioncomment-6065438 https://github.com/orgs/elegantframework/discussions/49#disc...
herbst 3y ago
That's no real reason. If I use a bootstrap template and some rails magic I have the same professional site up just as fast but I don't hinder my future success trough a security nightmare, a overly complicated framework and super slow rendering times.

throwaway106382 3y ago

[dead]

pacifika 3y ago

The article misspells the product

ttul 3y ago

WordPress is dominant because it's the Lingua Franca of the web design world. Despite PHP sucking, WordPress is well known by everyone in the industry and competitors - even with far superior technology - have an impossible task disrupting something with such platform dominance. For comparison, Microsoft Windows still holds about 75% market share, a figure that has barely budged in the last five years, despite Apple making major inroads. https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...

xp84 3y ago

I beg of you, if you use Wordpress, and don’t have some reason you can’t do this: Use a static site generator plugin for Wordpress, host it completely behind IP restrictions or firewall rules, for only whoever needs to actually update it. The static site plugin will regenerate/update plain HTML files out of your WP instance whenever you tell it to; then it transfers those to your location of choice where they’ll just be hosted statically. Wordpress is a pile of garbage from a security standpoint and having it exposed to the internet is basically asking to be hacked constantly by spammers and script kiddies. But it is useful as an easy content generation tool anyone can use, and at the cadence most people actually update it, the regeneration compute time is trivial.

pacifika 3y ago
Not sure why this is the top comment. Set the permissions to read only and update via composer
- burnte 3y ago
  Agreed, Wordpress is one of the leading CMSs, and with proper security it's fine. Any half-baked cache app will do what this commenter recommends anyway. Some people still irrationally hate PHP and WP.
  - javchz 3y ago
    In my experience the vas majority of security attacks to WP sites are plugin related. But blaming WP and php for that is like bashing linux for users installing random binary files with sudo.
    - burnte 3y ago
      Precisely my point as well. Everything is bad when done poorly. :D
- xp84 3y ago
  Seems like a lot of work to still have a slow site, wasting tons of CPU to dynamically generate a site when most such sites stay static for days to months. Yes, you can probably install cache plugins to work around this but everyone is pointing out how you have to be super careful with plugins. If you don’t need a super dynamic site, Wordpress exposed to the Internet is an unnecessary choice. And it does have 0-days sometimes, so just “being perfect about updating, and knowing what plugins are trash and avoiding them” isn’t 100% adequate to keep your WP site secure.

nologic01 3y ago

Any tech that lasts this long has some serious mojo. Was checking out the SSG scene and with the exception of a couple of gems its a loud, confused buzzword cacophony screaming for attention.

gumballindie 3y ago

> Still, pretty impressive market penetration in a world that now has reliable generative AI and serverless lambda functions with 2 min deploys like Vercel and Netlify. Huh? What’s the link between generative ai and the need for a wp like tool? Or indeed lambda functions? Does the author think that _everyone_ is using aws?

ilamont 3y ago
SEO keyword stuffing strikes again.

uzername 3y ago

I don't mind WordPress. My company doesn't use it for its marketing sites though, prefers larger more monolithic enterprise options. But it's not a startup either. From what I heard WordPress was not favored because maintenance was difficult (plugins, vulnerabilities, upgrades) and also there was uncertainty about gpl. A while ago some startups I worked were using webflow and instapage for their marketing sites.

iJohnDoe 3y ago

Why wouldn’t you? Great platform to get a site up and running quickly. MVP.

devhead 3y ago

for my company we still see it in use after all these years and countless security incidents because it's just left there. I could not personally ever imagine wanting to install that and thinking it's a good thing. Recently I have had to help restore one that was completely infected, before we acquired the business. The amount of BS that still is exactly the same as it was the last time i was forced to manage WP in the early 2000's is insane. I get the draw, I just don't agree with it and would never openly advocate for it to be considered. Every reason to not use it can be excused if you want to make an excuse for it or do something different with it, but at the end of the day it's dated and offers more headache and pain than any usefulness of it as a tool in hosting a site. Here's some of my bug A boos... - Doesn't scale - Wants open permissions on files - Wants you to use plugins - Exposes services it doesn't need to expose - Hardcode's FQDN in links and resources, and everything it can - Defaults to be the dumbest install settings to make it "easy" for everyone - Debugging is still a nightmare - Logging is not consistent - Maintains state on a machine, preventing you from scaling or high availability - Codebase has no real framework to extend and use, preference on adding your own bad code to it in order to make it work. - Does not work well with CI/CD automations - Is a huge target of vulnerability scanners - Page updates use a huge post size that is expensive to inspect w/firewall - Making changes can and will take your site down - Lets you modify a template file from the gui, but only the first directory level, making you still need to push changes to underlying files in a template. - Performance is a joke - Problem with a plugin can crash the full site - SQL injection is still a significant problem again, i know someone can rationalize them all away; you are putting in a ton of work that you could have done otherwise with a better solution and not have the ongoing limitations and nightmare associated with it. If you run it, you should consider it to already be hacked and move accordingly. Often times i hear the argument, well there's nothing i need on there so it's not a security risk...i think your customers would dissagree when they start getting infected with crypto miners, clicking affilitate links that aren't yours, linking to malware, viewing content you didn't add, downloading files that are dangerous, using your hacked system to attack others, and on and on. edit: format

barbariangrunge 3y ago

Anybody use ghost? How do you find that?

XCSme 3y ago

Yes, it's usually a one-click install and comes with an easy way to switch between themes, can give access to others to write content (editors) and you can easily get extra goodies on the same installation like contact forms, newsletters, reservation systems, e-commerce, etc.

droobles 3y ago

No, not since around 2017. I personally use Jekyll now for all my startup-y websites.