I recently started a blog for a pet project of mine, via Wordpress, and I absolutely hate it. Their editor, Gutenberg, is the worst thing I've ever worked with. It's super laggy once the post even gets halfway long -- I'm talking multiple second delays in typing and it appearing on screen. It's so bad I've taken to editing my stuff in Pages/Word.
Which leads to another issue that it doesn't keep the formatting when I try to copy-paste. It's just such a mess and it's almost given me to give up on this project or move away from Wordpress entirely. The editor is so God-awful I don't see how anyone can use it and like it.
Gutenberg is an absolute piece of crap, and is a UX nightmare. It exists solely for massaging Matt's ego.
Every single non-designer person I've created a Wordpress site for has yelled loud abuses at it and told me to disable it because they "just want to write a fucking blog post, not design a new web page each time". And each time I have to install a plugin to do that. Who the hell wants to create new blocks for each sub-heading and paragraph when they're writing regular articles? The old editor is much easier to use.
Then I got to understand how easy Gutenberg actually is.
You can just type and press enter. That's it. Click a block, switch it to a header. Or a paragraph. Easy.
I think one thing people don't realize is at the bottom of the editor there are breadcrumbs, and they allow you to select within the hierarchy of blocks you are working in - for things like columns for example. Before I noticed this, I hated Gutenberg, now I can just click the breadcrumb to select my block and a lot of frustration is resolved.
I know, unintuitive interfaces are bad, and this feels totally hacky, and I hope that it gets better, but knowing how to use this has made Gutenberg a joy for me to use over the old editor.
> Who the hell wants to create new blocks for each sub-heading and paragraph when they're writing regular articles? The old editor is much easier to use.
You add new paragraphs by just pressing enter, and you make it a heading by typing (part of) "/heading". It's less work than in the old editor, and it even produces reasonable markup (entirely unlike the old editor). If you don't want to design a new web page, just... don't? You don't need to press every button available.
There is no guarantee that this will work for the next years, as the author itself states in the plugin page:
> “I can’t make any promises, but I intend to develop with WordPress for the long-haul. Who knows what the future holds, but the plan is to keep Disable Gutenberg going for many years to come.”
The only official way to use the classic editor is by installing the Classic Editor plugin and WordPress will stop supporting it by the end of 2021.
I prefer Gutenberg, but I will be stuck with this for years for the legacy sites from clients that demand them. I'm not installing it because I want to.
That's odd. I personally really like the Gutenberg editor for writing (and similar block-based editors like Notion). I have never experienced the lag on a dated 2015 laptop. Out of curiosity, which device you're experiencing the lag on?
I run WP both locally and on a $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet. On Firefox, on a 2014 MBP running Catalina I have no lag issues.
I do find Gutenberg's UX a bit clunky though. But I also recognise that it is the first step to a full WYSIWIG site editor approach that site builder plugins like Divi and Elementor have found success with.
2015 MBP, running Firefox. I've also experienced the lag on Chrome.
Right now I'm transcribing old Irish-language stories and giving a commentary about various features. I notice if the story gets too long, or if I get too many bullets in the list block, it starts to get super laggy. I've noticed it across both browsers. And the sad part is the "long" really isn't that long, about a page of stuff in Pages/Word.
I’ve found that in themes that use WPBakery or ACF for layout is that there is definitely a happy path that involves swapping your text into one of their provided templates and calling it a day.
I despise the Gutenberg Editor, if only for reasons that it is not how people write. I don't want to interrupt my thinking by clicking to add blocks, I just want one big white sheet of virtual paper, to start writing untill the end.
> I don't want to interrupt my thinking by clicking to add blocks, I just want one big white sheet of virtual paper, to start writing untill the end.
There's a lot to criticize Gutenberg for, but this is not one of them. It's a big white sheet of virtual paper, and you can write your paragraphs without any clicking. Pressing enter opens a new paragraph, you can make it a heading by starting with (part of) "/heading" and pressing enter once more. It's easy to add more complicated blocks, but you don't have to.
And that's one of the things that is great about Gutenberg, being able to search for and activate different content types without touching a mouse is the last thing I thought I'd find in a blog/cms editor but there it is, and it's great.
Unfortunately, I'm using Wordpress.com, which only allows plugins if you pay. I haven't looked at porting over to wordpress.org, but perhaps I should. I do agree Gutenberg is absolutely awful. Why they ever thought it was a good idea, and why they keep doubling down on it, I'll never understand.
I find this whole discussion a bit off but if you don't have a stake in the WordPress ecosystem and don't want to self host why not try Ghost, substack, weebly, wix and others ?
Part of the issue is I'm not sure if I'm going to stick with this project, so I'd rather not pay for it quite yet (especially as money is much tighter now that our third roommate moved out). WordPress I knew had a free plan without needing to host anything. I was hoping I'd like it/stick with the project and eventually pay and host it either through them or via a self-hosted instance. It was simply to get the project off the ground and started, but I wasn't willing to do that all yet.
Gutenberg is just one of the bad things about WordPress. I too recently built a website on WP because I wanted to buy a theme and move fast.
What a management nightmare that thing is! Especially the extensions and theme ecosystem. They makes upgrading WP basically impossible without breaking everything. And not upgrading means a potential security vulnerability waiting to be exploited.
I gave up and rewrote the entire thing with Jamstack.
It seems like there truly is a gap in the market between WordPress, Wix and vanilla everything, but sadly, I'm not sure it's a market worth pursuing, financially speaking.
I've had the same experience, but then I've had the same experience with every WYSIWYG html editor. Is there one that works reliably for you with copy-paste of arbitrary html?
I had more luck with Gutenberg if I first copy-pasted what I was working on into Google Docs, sadly. It kept the paragraph breaks and the bullets, though it did a second line of them in Wordpress's "list" block, but that was easily fixed. It's really annoying, as I like to keep it all in Pages since I'm working on a manuscript for a possible book, but if that's what I have to do I guess that's what I have to do. Sadly, I've not found any other way.
I started a blog too and felt the same way as you do. I tried WordPress because it's so popular, but I could not use it.
I like Go, so I thought I would try hugo and I absolutely love it. It's fast, secure and can be hosted for pennies per day. I wrote a blog post about it just yesterday ;)
I don't ? I have contributed to core, have used WP for a decade, created numerous plugins (wpgear, wordphing) and themes . I have an opinion about Gutenberg and am more familiar it's development cycle than most developers. How about you keep your opinion to yourself when it come to personal attacks.
Gutenberg is the EMACS of web content creation. Great for creating webpages, just lacks a decent text editor.
On a more serious note though, I have personally experienced the lags on Gutenberg. And I am not sure whether the issue is with some implementation issues or due to the fact that it is a 3 mb react based blob.
Yeah if anything is gonna kill WP it’s gonna be that fucking new editor, IMHO. It’s crap. I tried it for five minutes and installed the Classic Editor plugin to get it the fuck out of my life.
As someone who writes plugins for our Wordpress-based 'headless' CMS for our authors to use (the front-end is all Angular 9+), the biggest gripes I found with the Gutenberg blocks editor was the need to learn some React to build the admin UI elements.
For personal projects, I now build most of the 'admin' in Angular too.
The introduction of Wordpress JSON and the REST API changed everything for me (and the small team), to allow more separation of concerns between the front and back ends.
Given the 600k+ installations of the "Disable Gutenberg" plugin[1], this is not an uncommon opinion. It sounds like this would be a good option for you.
I understand your disdain for their new editor, but it is not required. The great part about Wordpress is the ecosystem of plugins and customizability of the CMS. You can just add the Classic Editor plugin and you can use the old editor - it is that simple.
If the editor is laggy it is because of the server / infrastructure you are using, not the editor. I can guarantee this as a fact.
I wouldn't brush off Wordpress. I've used pretty much every CMS on the market with client work and Wordpress is the one that I prefer the most for websites, hands down. For custom applications, I prefer Contentful for the backend CMS. There is a reason that Wordpress is #1 and has the market share it does. It is not flawless, but it is the best once you get to know it. Especially when you know how to optimize and debug problems.
If you are just doing a pet project and simple blog and you don't want to spend a few minutes to figure things out, then it might not be for you. There are many options for a simple blog. Like any technology worth knowing, in order to maximize its features you need to learn how it works. Best of luck to you.
> You can just add the Classic Editor plugin and you can use the old editor - it is that simple.
This is a terrible take from an ops perspective. "Just install plugins" ignores the fact that you're adding arbitrary executable code to your server, hoping whoever maintains it actually maintains it, actually secures it, and actually doesn't sell the plugin to a nefarious party at a later date.
Which is to say nothing of how many orgs allow management and marketing to choose which plugins to install. Try prying those access rights from their cold dead hands...
You are in a wrong comments thread. This is a post about how popular with is WordPress and it is popular because you install plugins there and have site without completely any programming language. There are no ops (or at least they are not a part of wordpress success), there are people who know how to buy shared hosting and that's it.
> I understand your disdain for their new editor, but it is not required. The great part about Wordpress is the ecosystem of plugins and customizability of the CMS. You can just add the Classic Editor plugin and you can use the old editor - it is that simple.
You can do this if you pay for hosting or an account on wordpress.com. As this was meant to be a pet project, I really didn't want to pay for it, so went with the wordpress.com free account.
> If the editor is laggy it is because of the server / infrastructure you are using, not the editor. I can guarantee this as a fact.
I mean, you'd think that Wordpress's own editor wouldn't lag on their free account/hosting, especially if they're wanting people to upgrade and not leave?
> If you are just doing a pet project and simple blog and you don't want to spend a few minutes to figure things out, then it might not be for you.
I've spent the time trying to figure it out. The bigger issue is I don't want to pay currently, until I'm certain I'm going to stick with this project. Sadly, the only way to fix the problems is by paying.
> You can do this if you pay for hosting or an account on wordpress.com. As this was meant to be a pet project, I really didn't want to pay for it, so went with the wordpress.com free account.
A payment is actually not needed in order to use the Classic Editor with a Free site.
There is also a possibility to edit or create any post or page in WP Admin, which will allow you to use the Classic Editor. Navigate to yoursite.WordPress.com/wp-admin and then click on Posts or Pages in the left sidebar.
Next you can hover over any post or page title and choose the "Classic Editor" link below the title. If you wish to create a new post or page within Classic Editor, then please click the down arrow next to the Add New button at the top and choose Classic Editor.
We are also happy to answer any of your questions and try to understand why the editor is laggy for you if you send us an email via help@WordPress.com. Thank you!
If you want to create a blog without knowledge of code and/or hosting servers then I wouldn't use Wordpress. Something like Wix or Squarespace would be more up your alley. I understand not everyone is in the position to pay money on certain things, but if you don't want to pay then don't expect things to work amazingly well. Hosting servers isn't cheap.
dorchadas, we haven't been able to track down your account, but if you get in touch with help@WordPress.com and link to this thread, would love to debug the slowness with you, and also happy to comp you a 300/year business account which supports plugins and themes for 3 years.
> If the editor is laggy it is because of the server / infrastructure you are using, not the editor. I can guarantee this as a fact.
I would expect that once the editor loads, unless you trigger an option that requires something from the backend, it would just work. Does it actually send data back and forth during the writing process?
When Wordpress is lagging, it is always because of the infrastructure, whether that is client or server side. The editor does not send data to the backend. Without actually having access to the machine, I can almost guarantee that there are issues with the client-side machine or browser which is the reason for the lagging.
I said server or infrastructure, meaning server or client-side machine / browser. Essentially, their hosting or local environment. The code loading in their browser which is causing the lag is the same code for everyone else, and this is not a reproducible issue in the WP community. If this person's account of things is accurate, then any lags in Wordpress would be a local environment issue.
If you just want to type with no(ok, less) pain the classic editor plugin is a good starting point.
I think Gutenberg has a chance to get good but it’s main problem is that no one is using it because no one is using it, because they are already used to plugins like WP Bakery and Elementor.
Even ~10 years ago the shitty shared hosting I used had a one-click WP install, so if they still do that, that’s an an option. Otherwise Bedrock+Trellis is fairly straightforward to setup on a VPS if you have time to do that.
Until at least 2022 (end of 2021) but I would be willing to bet they end up having to support it much longer given the install base is now absolutely massive and people, even the most Wordpress diehards, hate Gutenberg.
The confounding factor here, I suspect, is the explosive growth in the sheer number of blogspam websites. Passive income coaches have been pumping out courses on affiliate link blogs for years now, so lots of people have dozens or hundreds of them, and that noise likely drowns out the signal of people putting more thought into choosing a framework for a site they actually care about.
WordPress is a pain in the ass when doing that kind of thing now. It is way better to use HUGO/Jekyll generators with CI/CD and Netlify/Cloudflare. You can automate almost every portion of an affiliation website and forget about it. That's the ultimate goal of those websites, be self-sufficient and passive earners.
I use Jekyll + GitHub Pages for my personal tech blog. Posts are written in plain 'md' files that once pushed to the remote repo trigger the generation of final HTML pages. I love the simplicity, and that I don't have to worry about hosting. Not to mention that is completely free.
I find it weird (it's even borderline disingenuous) how there are so many people on HN claiming it's easier to set up a jekyll/hugo/pelican installation sending compiled HTML/CSS/JS rendered from a local folders full of markdown files through github via webhooks and orchestrating that stack from the command line than running a wix/wordpress/blogger/whatever.
Especially when we are so vocal about data lock-in on every github submissions.
You can’t be serious. Jekyll blogs are pure text files you can download and view in a thousand ways. Good luck extracting sensible data from WordPress’ database without losing metadata. Which one has the worst lock-in? The former certainly isn’t locked to anything.
GitHub Pages with Jekyll don’t even need an explicit build step.
Are you serious yourself ? On second reading you sound like satire and irony.
Anyway, I forgot to add git to the list of tools needed. It's really easier once you throw git into the whole thing.
> Good luck extracting sensible data from WordPress’ database without losing metadata.
What ? You know you can do SQL queries, right ? And if you can set up the whole bang for jekyll/git you certainly can do SQL queries. And use the WP rest API. And the internal WP query API. You are more likely to lose integrity of your metadata stored in a yaml header in md files because of a typo at some points. How do you even start to lose metadata when WordPress enforces consistency and validation on every article saves ?
But forget about all that, that's software dev stuff. WP comes with built-in to sort and look at metadata and posts.
> Which one has the worst lock-in? The former certainly isn’t locked to anything.
Now you are trolling. You know full well I am refering to storing files in github. Which is owned by the good old and trusty evil MS. Not saying it's not easy to move things (you don't send your files only to gihub, right ?) but tying yourself to github is a worst lock-in than your own mysql database.
> GitHub Pages with Jekyll don’t even need an explicit build step.
That just doesn't make any sense. There are way more steps before you can even type 'git push' and then hit a browser URL https://pages.github.com/
And that's just for the setup of the whole thing. It's always gonna be faster to move around widgets and widgets content to cusomize sidebars and footers in WordPress than diving into jekyll templates.
And this is from a guy who spent the afternoon setting up strapi on a VPS and is getting into gatsby because it looks fun.
I agree with you that Jekyll is not necessarily easier to set up when compared to WP (even though I didn't say that in my original comment). For non technical folks static site generators, GitHub, DNS, SSL, etc may seem like rocket science, and a hosted WP subscription will be way more user friendly.
Nevertheless I believe that most software developers will find setting up and managing a static site blog pretty easy, just a matter of forking a pre-configured Jekyll / GitHub Pages repository, fiddling with it's theme, and then configuring their our custom domain and hosting options. There are plenty of tutorials on this subject.
If we were to compare self hosted WP and Jekyll then I would even argue that Jekyll is less complex, since it's just a bunch of static files behind a simple web server that doesn't require SSR or a backing MySQL database.
Jekyll writing experience may be considered worse for most, since you are required to write directly in 'md' files using markdown and sometimes even HTML elements. But again, if you're familiar with front-end development this may not be an issue to you, and I actually prefer it this way.
I sort of agree with this. I run hugo locally and have a simple bash script that generates the html, removes the remote public html files (via ssh) and scps the new html files to the web server. Kind of old school, and causes about a minute of downtime when I make a change, but it works for me.
Same reason why I set up my blog with Hugo + CloudFront. That, and to learn something new. It's neat to run your build-and-push command, and see everything deployed in a moment. Blazing fast, and you only pay for the DNS.
Wordpress community is a beast. The availability of so many themes and plugins is the main reason for wordpress' market share. I tried using Gatsby and Hugo, but if u want to add payment or shipping then you start feeling how limiting those tools are. U would find 1 or 2 solutions only if you are lucky. Otherwise, you have to write your own tool and spend time and money re-inventing the wheel.
But definitely some like Gatsby and Next.js run much faster, as they pre-render the pages, so they have their niches.
Try looking for a shipping plugin on wordpress, you will find different ones for different countries!!
This explains why wordpress share is almost 40%. It is the community!
Seeing the Magento market share brought sweet nostalgia from the 2010s era. For a brief period of time it was all the rage in PHP commerce. It was seen as more professional than a WooCommerce setup (performance and bugs aside, I guess).
Magento 2 released and it had a better aesthetic, but it was more of the same broken ideas no one wanted to work with. Why the team went with a fresh take on the old XML-based configuration is beyond me.
Clients I worked with passed on Magento 2. Somewhere in here there is a lesson I can't articulate :-)
We use Magento 2. Once you get over the fact that the XML system is batshit insane and start to work with it, it's not a horrible system to develop with.
I have a WooCommerce - based e-shop, it is a very nice system, and a cheap one. Compared to the costs of setting up even a modest grocery stand IRL, WooCommerce is extremely affordable. For a beginner, existence of WooCommerce means a significant reduction of barriers to enter the market.
I do like the user interface of WooCommerce, it fits quite nice into WordPress. What I don't like about WooCommerce is that they don't care about backwards-compatibility. WordPress Core is very much into backwards-compatibility, and I think plugins and themes should follow that idea. I do wish something better then WooCommerce would show up for WordPress.
And another thing, that I personally don't have much of a stake in, a lot of WooCommerce addon plugins are of dubious quality. Following the Wordfence blog about security issues in plugins, there are often Woo plugins that have quite some big issues, like unauthenticated SQL attack or similar. As a hacker you don't even have to go to the trouble of multi-staging several security issues to get in, 1 of these is enough.
It's amazing how many people keep using this POS. It's just like Jenkins. Total POS, but literally everyone uses it. I suspect because the complexity of building a feature-parity replacement is so large that nobody really gets started on it, because it'd take probably 3 years to reach a point where it makes more sense to use the alternative.
What's amazing as well is how the companies who churn out these techno-turds have no compunction about the design flaws of their tools. Oh, everything about using these things is an anti-pattern? But we're still making money right?
People who promote static site generators do not understand why Wordpress is popular. Wordpress is like the anti-static-site-generator. People who use it don't care about automation or robustness or simplicity. They just don't want to deal with any technical bullshit. Just let me point and click on things.
I mean, shit, I spent several months building my custom templates for Wordpress years ago, and I haven’t really had to do anything with it since. It works. I go off and make the art and comics it’s there to hold, and I spend a few minutes in WP posting it. And WP autoposts about my posts to the social media sites that have completely replaced RSS. The last goddamn thing I want to do is be on the bleeding edge of some bullshit that I have to be constantly hacking on.
It may be a giant mess under the hood, but my experience is one of automation, robustness, and simplicity. It just keeps on trucking along with no more thought on my part than “oh it wants to update, okay let’s hit that update button on the core and plugins” every so often.
After several years now using Drone and bazel for managing CI/CD, I would take Jenkins in a heart beat. Jenkins is sooo much better than Drone, it almost makes me cry.
It looks like they try to compensate for that, per their FAQ page:
> For the surveys, we count the top 10 million websites according to Alexa and Tranco, see our technology overview for more explanations. We do crawl more sites, but we use the top 10 million to select a representative sample of established sites. We found that including more sites in the sample (e.g. all the sites we know) may easily lead to a bias towards technologies typically used for "throw-away" sites or parked sites or other types of spam domains.
There are content-writing AI's which you almost cannot tell is not written by a human, I would be surprised if an automated crawler would be able to tell the difference when humans barely can.
I've even seen agencies use these tools regularly, which makes it possible to spew out several sites per day.
Yes, it actually is. Web agencies throughout the world build and launch thousands (likely more) of sites a day in Wordpress. They are all legitimate businesses that once had other CMSs or just never had a web presence.
I love WordPress. Takes 5 minutes to setup on a VPS and it has so many themes and plugins. Also PHP makes it easy to quickly fiddle with pages without too much “tooling distractions”.
It doesn't. The green line is for "None", meaning the test couldn't figure out which CMS was used. Many platforms now hide which CMS is being used, not to mention custom JS applications built with React and other frameworks/libraries would end up under "None" as well.
Which is different from "raw HTML". After all, everything the browser parses in the end is raw HTML, but this graph is about CMSs in particular.
Yes, that is how the survey works. None includes anything that can't be identified and raw html, too. That makes WordPress's achievement all the more impressive.
WordPress as other PHP frameworks have on advantage: Most hosting companies optimize their services for these things so it's cheaper and easier to deploy.
Pangs of nostalgia seeing PHP-Nuke down there at the bottom.
The first paid freelance website 'CMS' I built for a company back in the early-mid 90s was based on a heavily modified version of 'WWW-Board' from Matt's Script Archive.
I often use wordpress purely as an admin and make the frontend using the rest api. Together with advanced custom fields pro it is unbeatable in terms of speed of development for anything that isn't performance critical.
> Also, this looks like a bleak picture for the JAMStack if Wordpress keeps growing no?
The JAMStack has a usability problem. That's why wordpress keeps growing.
What do i need for wordpress? some cheap(maybe even free) webspace and a database. updates to the wordpress core are quite simple doable via webinterface. done. with this even the biggest simpleton can write blogposts.
with a jam stack? headless cmses, blogposts written in markdown, config in "frontmatter", building and deploying your blog, versioning via git, not even a litte autocomplete.
even i recommend wordpress because i have not the time and nerves to teach non-it people to use the JAMStack.
Wordpress seems like a great end to end solution for people who don't want to write their own CMS or bother with command line tools and complicated setup. There a lot of CMS tools out there but wordpress hits the sweetspot of wide variety of hosting & managed solutions, high customizability, and ease of use for non technical users.
I got rid of it on my own website some time ago but the startup I'm with still uses it. It's great; doesn't need my attention and our marketing people can deal with content. I'll likely transition it over to a managed solution at some point but beyond that I don't have the bandwidth to building and maintaining a new company website.
> Not necessarily, at least JAMStack front-end frameworks like Next and Gatsby can co-exist with Wordpress because headless support from WP.
Sure, but no-one but very technical minded people would pick those instead of just WP. It's just extra complexity which you don't need when you start a blog or a shop or something like that. I would have a hard time defending it unless in very specific situations; wp is just too stable, too many plugins, too many programmers can support it, designers can make templates for it with ease etc, all hosters support it for next to nothing etc and without setup.
Not hard to make the connection between SCMs (like Git) and CMSs, one could even say SCM is a form of CMS, just a focus on code instead of general "content". Add a way to render content and serve it, and you have a CMS.
I'd love to hear about self-hosted alternatives, especially ones where you can have a comments section. There are plugins in Wordpress that do comments (not brilliantly), but alternatives seem quite complex. It would be great to be able to interact with whoever reads your content..
You could consider reviewing how others do it. There's a reason why less and less want to host their comments and outsource that instead. Comment = write access to your site. You don't want that. There are multi-million dollar spam farms dedicating hundreds of developers to finding ways to spam and abuse comments.
Every single WP, Drupal and Joomla website that I know that was not properly maintained or hosted with a major provider (such as WP@WP themselves) got hacked at some point.
Right - but I really do want comments. This site and many many others have write access and manage. If a self-hosted solution ever caused me issues on account of spam etc, I'd review the situation.
With outsourcing comments someone else handles (some of) the back-end, facilitating appearance of comments on your site but limiting your own back-end exposure.
Wordpress is a fascinating example of worse-is-better in market-facing technology.
I was working with Wordpress early on and finally fired my last client 2 years ago.
What many inexperienced clients expect from technology is a miracle, a magic pill, and if they get an experience that is "easier" and "intuitive", they will ignore all other issues. It got uneasy quick enough for them.
I always found it hilarious, when I still had a consulting gig, when clients would cancel their yearly service and upkeep subscription because "we can do everything with plug-ins, and my kid/ friend/ junior assistant can do Wordpress" only to come back with a last-minute "save us" fix request because their install was hacked due to disabled automatic updates, crappy plug-ins (the new "wordpress expert" could not review plug-in quality).
And whatever they do, they always start changing the theme and colors when they take over. Because everyone is an expert on what they can see. Oh boy, does choice of font and headings formatting matter! Why waste budget on back-ups, static world-facing pages, hardening the admin, let alone implementing testing and statistics to identify customer needs and interest, etc.
People are fascinating - today, most of them have lost data when a phone or computer crashed. They know about back-ups from past painful experience. But if you look at statistics for themes vs back-up implementations and downloads, It's the presentation that matters most. They can't tell you why. It hurts them to articulate why!
If you look at logs for any world-facing website, you will see multiple scans for Wordpress vulnerabilities. If you review WP security history, it includes astounding penetration of core architecture. They decide Emojis are a core system feature? Not preventing user enumeration or XSS? Emojis get hacked. Tweaking theme colors is ever so important? Core Wordpress color tweaking gets hacked. JSON REST API is important turned on out of the box for some reasion? That gets hacked. Long history of bad decisions that should have not been enabled by default.
Wordpress right is not easy. But it gives the inexperienced customers more of what they think they want, out of the box, than any other CMS system. There's a lesson there.
For me as a consultant, it was: either outsource a large part of my business to someone very cheap and work as a reseller if I want to stay in Wordpress, or raise my customer quality.
It is unfair to blame the customer, we are not any closer to core scientific principles in computer education than when we started. Information science should be core of the school curriculum, and we should have the same open scientific standards in our digital literacy courses that we have in physics or biology. It would be great if people could understand the difference between information and presentation, for starters.
It was impossible to point out to my customers that Craigslist was successful without any styling because they were delivering value to their customers. Most thought a good website "looked good, you know, like Apple".
This client sounds like a mom and pop shop, if I'm being honest. Those clients will always want the most for the lowest possible cost.
Clients that consider their websites to be a cost centre or a checklist item for their marketing strategy are the types that say things like 'our intern can handle this going forward'.
Clients that have their website as a source of their income (say an ecommerce store or online course website built using WooCommerce or one of the LMS plugins) recognize its value and would respect the advice of the person hired to manage it.
Thanks for your feedback.
The case cited was a 3-state machine distributor with 45 full-time employees. I've gotten the same sentiment, perhaps slightly differently worded,and argued, from some well-known actors, you might have read their information products when they still had WP as a core "blogging" platform, when that was a thing.
With my current base, I concentrate on decision makers being engineers, they usually look at the spec breakdown and don't need to "understand" why support, maintenance and security are on there. Product is not WP :)
I've built a couple of WordPress websites (under protest). My general approach is to use "Advanced Custom Fields" and a relatively barebones installation with a custom theme built from scratch. It turns into something of a simple CRUD web application thereafter which covers the vast majority of simple websites. For eCommerce, I install WooCommerce.
Here is why it happened:
1) (~2014) Company A is a Fortune 500 company with a large presence in my country. We designed some concepts for their product websites, which they really liked. When it came to implementation, they gave us a list of acceptable CMS technology. They'd be deploying to some kind of Plesk infrastructure and they were only allowed to use a handful of the frameworks supported by Plesk.
Of the ones included, WordPress was probably one of the better choices. I tried to convince them to let us go with something simple instead of a full-fledged WordPress installation. They said their internal security policy prevented them from allowing this, and that their team was only familiar with doing pentesting, audits, etc. for known entities like WordPress.
So we built the website and handed it over to their security team. We got paid and they deployed the website and I forgot all about it. Funnily enough, their server was breached a few years later. When they were doing an investigation they contacted me, and I shared the emails about pentesting, audits, security, etc. They were a little embarassed. Nonetheless, they're still frequent customers. Unfortunately they still insist on WordPress. We built maybe 6 product websites for them.
2) (~2015) Company B is a small brick and mortar business. Their developer built them a WordPress website but disappeared on them. I ended up deleting a large amount of bloat and plugins and writing them via simpler controller actions via a theme building framework.
3) (~2019) Company C is a ~$5bn private company with a global presence. Similar situation as Company A. The internal team insisted on either Wix or WordPress. The Ops/Marketing guys say nobody understands technology so they have to do what the IT folks say.
I've also spoken to at least 100 potential customers who all had the same story (similar to #2). They were non-technical people who wanted to build a website for their product/service. Their budget wasn't great. They gave all their money to a freelance developer. Developer wasn't really a developer - he just knew how to install a specific combination of WordPress plugins and set them up to get the outcome that they wanted. They wanted to customize it beyond what the plugin allowed, the developer said it wasn't possible and started asking for their money. Relationship soured and they parted ways. In all of those cases they spoke to me and ended up going to market with what they have. Maybe 1 or 2 of them ended up with a successful product/service and came back someday for a rebuild.
WordPress is absolutely terrible but sadly it is not going anywhere.
> They were non-technical people who wanted to build a website for their product/service. Their budget wasn't great. They gave all their money to a freelance developer. Developer wasn't really a developer - he just knew how to install a specific combination of WordPress plugins and set them up to get the outcome that they wanted. They wanted to customize it beyond what the plugin allowed, the developer said it wasn't possible and started asking for their money.
This is so widespread and horrible. The owner usually doesn't know anyone that can help walk through everything OR don't want to listen.
I've inherited a bunch of sites like this and it usually just ends up on having to rebuild everything and migrating content.
Edit: Not sure why this was deeply hidden within the website but here's what I could find:
"When interpreting our surveys, you should know the following:
We investigate technologies of websites, not of individual web pages. If we find a technology on any of the pages, it is considered to be used by the website.
We include only the top 10 million websites (top 1 million before June 2013) in the statistics in order to limit the impact of domain spammers. We include all sites that are either in the Alexa top 10 million or in the Tranco top 1 million list. Website popularity rankings are sometimes considered inaccurate for measuring website traffic, but we find that they serve our purpose of providing a representative sample of established sites very well.
We exclude sites that have no useful content, e.g. sites that only show the default web server page.
We do not consider subdomains to be separate websites. For instance, sub1.example.com and sub2.example.com are considered to belong to the same site as example.com. That means for example, that all the subdomains of blogger.com, wordpress.com and similar sites are counted only as one website.
We do not include redirected domains. For example, Sun.com redirects to Oracle.com, and is therefore not counted.
Because our definition of "website" differs a bit from Alexa's and Tranco's definition, the "top 10 million" websites are actually not exactly 10 million. However, this has no statistical significance.
Our reports are updated daily.
Please be aware of the limitations indicated in our disclaimer."
Which leads to another issue that it doesn't keep the formatting when I try to copy-paste. It's just such a mess and it's almost given me to give up on this project or move away from Wordpress entirely. The editor is so God-awful I don't see how anyone can use it and like it.