WordPress's Matt in debate with Netlify's Matt(theregister.com)
theregister.com
WordPress's Matt in debate with Netlify's Matt
https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/13/wordpress_matt_vs_netlify_matt/
101 comments
I just built my first site in Gatsby (https://pubgood.dev/) and I honestly missed WordPress. Gatsby just doesn't take care of enough stuff without having to install a bunch of other solutions. I'm not sure of the extent I will use it in client sites.
I haven't regularly done client WP work in several years but I'm planning on doing some over the next year and I'm curious - how good is Gutenberg now? Before it would be adding fields to the admin with a plugin like Advanced Custom Fields - were they able to make it truly WYSIWYG for editing content?
I haven't regularly done client WP work in several years but I'm planning on doing some over the next year and I'm curious - how good is Gutenberg now? Before it would be adding fields to the admin with a plugin like Advanced Custom Fields - were they able to make it truly WYSIWYG for editing content?
Use something like Contentful with Gutenberg
I'll look into that, thanks. I need to design the technical solution I am going to use for client work and I want it to be as cutting edge as possible without being a nightmare to maintain.
Putting in a word for Sanity CMS, it's like contentful but more programmatic. It also doesn't need so much of the constant 'publish draft' button clicking.
Look into ACF Blocks (it's part of ACF now), they allow you to very easily extend Gutenberg with minimal coding and simple templating.
WordPress core team is still working on the "full site editing" project (that is, being able to edit headers, footers and sidebars in Gutenberg). It's coming probably later this year or beginning of 2021. But you can still edit a lot of things with Gutenberg as-is.
https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/blocks/
WordPress core team is still working on the "full site editing" project (that is, being able to edit headers, footers and sidebars in Gutenberg). It's coming probably later this year or beginning of 2021. But you can still edit a lot of things with Gutenberg as-is.
https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/blocks/
Gridsome is the one that I use (VueJS version of Gatsby). What are the sorts of things you found it couldn't do?
I want to get our team using it for simpler projects, and I haven't really hit any blockers with Gridsome, whereas I've hit plenty with Wordpress when we need a specific url structure.
I want to get our team using it for simpler projects, and I haven't really hit any blockers with Gridsome, whereas I've hit plenty with Wordpress when we need a specific url structure.
It's not that it can't do anything, it's that you have to actually implement things at a lower level. I mean, Gatsby doesn't have any backend CMS out of the box so that's the most obvious thing. If you want to use Gatsby for clients who want to be able to manage their content, you have to select and integrate one.
But even for me, who doesn't need a backend GUI stuff like a contact form was a pain. Luckily I host with Netlify and they have an easy form solution but imagine that across many other situations even for a somewhat simple site. Now you're having to set up accounts with all these other services when before it was all contained in one place. All for what? The benefit doesn't seem substantial enough to me to give all of that up.
Even if you use WordPress as the backend, you've still got to deal with integrating it's API which is more work than something generating all the markup you need etc...
But even for me, who doesn't need a backend GUI stuff like a contact form was a pain. Luckily I host with Netlify and they have an easy form solution but imagine that across many other situations even for a somewhat simple site. Now you're having to set up accounts with all these other services when before it was all contained in one place. All for what? The benefit doesn't seem substantial enough to me to give all of that up.
Even if you use WordPress as the backend, you've still got to deal with integrating it's API which is more work than something generating all the markup you need etc...
Until recently had been a while since I've done anything wordpress either, but rather than ACF I've always been a fan of https://jeremyhixon.com/tool/wordpress-meta-box-generator/ -- such a neat way to do it for clients. Worked fine with Gutenberg as well.
Yea, I can register a domain name, spin up a wordpress site on some shared hosting platform and point it to that domain, install some nice-ish template, connect an email service, and even get some basic pages, (very) basic content, and a handful of useful plugins on there in an afternoon.
Honestly...what other stack could get you that far in 3-4 HOURS?
Honestly...what other stack could get you that far in 3-4 HOURS?
Exactly.
You can use something like forestry: https://forestry.io or any of the few alternatives for managing content for your static generator site.
Is there something like Forestry (CMS with Git as datastore) but self-hosted and/or open-source?
Or have a look at https://frontaid.io/ if you want to store your content in a JSON file in your own Git repository.
Absolutely. I work with Wordpress for the day job it'd be horrible trying to do the same for my own site. Every issue would feel like work.
For clients though? If they want WordPress (or give a feature list that sounds up WordPress' alley without needing a bespoke Laravel build) they get it. We'd lose all our customers if I tried to get them editing Hugo markdown files!
Netlify could do with watching their PR at this point I feel. The honeymoon period is over. I've personally switched my site to a fiver DigitalOcean box and Cloudflare because I already had the DO box for another project. The deploy is infinitely faster and I don't need to worry about hitting limits bumping me up to a 50 quid a month account
For clients though? If they want WordPress (or give a feature list that sounds up WordPress' alley without needing a bespoke Laravel build) they get it. We'd lose all our customers if I tried to get them editing Hugo markdown files!
Netlify could do with watching their PR at this point I feel. The honeymoon period is over. I've personally switched my site to a fiver DigitalOcean box and Cloudflare because I already had the DO box for another project. The deploy is infinitely faster and I don't need to worry about hitting limits bumping me up to a 50 quid a month account
Popular for small to midsize businesses to do what? Blog? They don't need wordpress to sell items or create their brochure pages. If they need a blog wordpress is good for that but even something like Medium may be a better option. The day of putting everything under one roof is gone.
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Maybe ecommerce or anything else, as it's also a bulletproof framework.
Blogging is not the primary use of Wordpress in practice for small to medium sized businesses.
Please share their primary use that cannot be sufficed with a third party application or beyond a static page? Im curious as to what these are not being snarky
I think the use-case is a CMS where a non-technical user can post files, create/update pages of static information with a wysiwyg editor, and have it all Just Work without having to ever see a command line or deal with errors from some mystery-meat generator process that has a bunch of its own ideas about correctness, style consistency, or whatever else.
As a former user who had one of those typical personal Wordpress blogs on a shared hosting setup, I experienced the nightmare of dealing with spam, hacking, having to constantly upgrade, etc. So for my own use I would never consider anything other than a static site generator; but I can see the appeal for many use cases, especially if the backend is managed (services like WP Engine) or semi-managed (the guy who set it up is getting a small monthly fee to keep an eye on things).
As a former user who had one of those typical personal Wordpress blogs on a shared hosting setup, I experienced the nightmare of dealing with spam, hacking, having to constantly upgrade, etc. So for my own use I would never consider anything other than a static site generator; but I can see the appeal for many use cases, especially if the backend is managed (services like WP Engine) or semi-managed (the guy who set it up is getting a small monthly fee to keep an eye on things).
I looked into WP Engine recently to see if I could transfer some older client websites, it's eye wateringly expensive!
I don't think it's meant to compete with DIYers or small-time bloggers— that market is covered by wordpress.com's paid plans, and value-add services on top of shared hosting, like what SiteGround offers.
My sense is that WP Engine targets busy professionals who have first-hand experience of how much hassle a WP installation can be to maintain, people for whom downtime or being hacked has potentially a severe cost in terms of lost business, reputational damage, etc. The other way to look at it is that $300/mo sounds like a lot for "just a WP installation", but it's peanuts compared to hiring another person for your IT department.
My sense is that WP Engine targets busy professionals who have first-hand experience of how much hassle a WP installation can be to maintain, people for whom downtime or being hacked has potentially a severe cost in terms of lost business, reputational damage, etc. The other way to look at it is that $300/mo sounds like a lot for "just a WP installation", but it's peanuts compared to hiring another person for your IT department.
That's fair - however I've been hosting some of these sites since 2014 on bare metal VPS with minimal issues (the occasional upgrade breaking a theme). A lot of WP issues come down to server settings / bad plugins over WP itself. I suspect WP Engine is largely charging that much to support any WP setup no matter how insecure.
Their platform actually actively tries to prevent you from being insecure. They limit what plugins you can install with an ever growing blacklist, and they try to handle as much of the performance stack as possible to reduce attack vectors. You don't like their caching layer? Too bad.
You're also paying for decent support tech's and support availability. I think to this day you can call and a human will pick up the phone. Tech's are well versed in the WordPress ecosystem and many are developers who can help you troubleshoot things at the code level, whereas with some budget webhost, they'll tell you to pound sand and hang up (albeit more politely).
That said, I think these "premium" WordPress hosts are purely for non-devs or devs with no time to provide their own support. If you're a developer, there is no reason to pay that premium to keep your blog online. If you want a more managed solution, use something like ServerPilot or SpinUp WP, or any number of other service that will provide a thin maintenance layer on top of any garden variety VPS provider.
You're also paying for decent support tech's and support availability. I think to this day you can call and a human will pick up the phone. Tech's are well versed in the WordPress ecosystem and many are developers who can help you troubleshoot things at the code level, whereas with some budget webhost, they'll tell you to pound sand and hang up (albeit more politely).
That said, I think these "premium" WordPress hosts are purely for non-devs or devs with no time to provide their own support. If you're a developer, there is no reason to pay that premium to keep your blog online. If you want a more managed solution, use something like ServerPilot or SpinUp WP, or any number of other service that will provide a thin maintenance layer on top of any garden variety VPS provider.
Still seems slow navigating the wordpress admin system though, maybe that's just Wordpress in general
Typically, it's because most of these businesses have some extra requirement. They need a brochure site + some complicated multi-step form, or some integration with a third party API. Wordpress is popular because if there is any platform for which there will be a turnkey plugin solution for these extra bits of functionality, it'll be wordpress.
The API will have an official plugin, or someone will have written one because their client needed it and the dev decided to support and sell it. Complicated forms can be turned out with plugins like Gravity forms.
This is why lots and lots of sites are still built on wordpress because the ecosystem around it lets people do a lot of stuff quickly without touching a line of code.
The API will have an official plugin, or someone will have written one because their client needed it and the dev decided to support and sell it. Complicated forms can be turned out with plugins like Gravity forms.
This is why lots and lots of sites are still built on wordpress because the ecosystem around it lets people do a lot of stuff quickly without touching a line of code.
I could see the benefit of creating many forms or ones that frequently updated.
One use case I had at a previous job was that they used word press for daily logs, inventory counts, hr portal, etc... Basically a form wrapper that would email the related departments with whatever the employees inputted.
Very simple and more then did the job. It costed basically nothing to use and pretty much anyone could maintain the site.
Very simple and more then did the job. It costed basically nothing to use and pretty much anyone could maintain the site.
I could see a small company needing a quick and cheap way to make a portal. These are things wordpress should perhaps focus more on and move away from the blog being central, but still make it available.
Anecdata:
I have semi-recently converted a couple of Wordpress and also Docuwiki sites to static sites. First with Hugo, then converted again from Hugo -> Jekyll.
I could not be happier with the results (...with Jekyll anyway, less so with Hugo). And there is no npm.
The biggest problem for me was mentioned in the article - security. It felt like I was frequently having to babysit updates in Dokuwiki and Wordpress. Both of the update procedures felt precarious and dangerous - more than once they'd fail to update and hose something on the server and I'd need to go in with a SFTP client or SSH and try to rectify whatever the hell happened. I grew to fear the updates and started to procrastinate doing them which was a warning sign. Perhaps they are perfect and flawless these days?
And even when I had updated there was always this lingering feeling that there was some unknown/unpatched exploit or I was 12 hours too late patching and so someone was "inside" my wordpress running a spam/phishing operation without me knowing (happened to me, but perhaps 15 years ago now and was due to the hosting provider so not really relevant... I only found out about that one when a victim of the phishing operation did a whois on the domain and sent me threatening messages. Nice.)
These sites that were on Wordpress/dokuwiki didn't even need to be "dynamic" anyway - they just needed to serve content and provide a simple way for people to edit the content. Github pages does a great job for this - non-tech users just use the in-browser editor and if they accidentally delete something there is the git changelog. The time "lost" to do a one-time compilation of the site is totally paid back by the near instantaneous loading time compared to the bloated feel of the previous sites waiting for PHP+MySQL to do its thing on some VPS or shared host (I did not have a CDN).
I have semi-recently converted a couple of Wordpress and also Docuwiki sites to static sites. First with Hugo, then converted again from Hugo -> Jekyll.
I could not be happier with the results (...with Jekyll anyway, less so with Hugo). And there is no npm.
The biggest problem for me was mentioned in the article - security. It felt like I was frequently having to babysit updates in Dokuwiki and Wordpress. Both of the update procedures felt precarious and dangerous - more than once they'd fail to update and hose something on the server and I'd need to go in with a SFTP client or SSH and try to rectify whatever the hell happened. I grew to fear the updates and started to procrastinate doing them which was a warning sign. Perhaps they are perfect and flawless these days?
And even when I had updated there was always this lingering feeling that there was some unknown/unpatched exploit or I was 12 hours too late patching and so someone was "inside" my wordpress running a spam/phishing operation without me knowing (happened to me, but perhaps 15 years ago now and was due to the hosting provider so not really relevant... I only found out about that one when a victim of the phishing operation did a whois on the domain and sent me threatening messages. Nice.)
These sites that were on Wordpress/dokuwiki didn't even need to be "dynamic" anyway - they just needed to serve content and provide a simple way for people to edit the content. Github pages does a great job for this - non-tech users just use the in-browser editor and if they accidentally delete something there is the git changelog. The time "lost" to do a one-time compilation of the site is totally paid back by the near instantaneous loading time compared to the bloated feel of the previous sites waiting for PHP+MySQL to do its thing on some VPS or shared host (I did not have a CDN).
Just did the other way last month from jekyll -> hugo after years on jekyll. Compile times down from 30 seconds to 300ms. Also was not able to reinstall jekyll with lots of ruby related errors and my knowledge of ruby is close to zero.
Why not run Wordpress locally and bake the site out to static files?
That way you get Wordpress content authoring and all the advantages of a static site you mention
That way you get Wordpress content authoring and all the advantages of a static site you mention
This is exactly what we do using Shifter (http://getshifter.io/).
Thank you for sharing Shifter. I’ll check this out. I work on a lot of Wordpress and GatsbyJS so a simpler path to static sites from a WP admin is something I’ve been looking for.
IMO this is the perfect middle ground where you need non technical people to make rapid edits to a live website. They can make edits to a dev/local environment which automatically get baked out and pulled into the live site on a set schedule.
Curious: why did you move from Hugo to Jekyll?
I just found that with Hugo it was really hard to get exactly what I wanted in terms of directory structure and theming.
E.g. just getting a simple child page listing at "domain.com/something/" to automatically list all child pages took hours and hours and I still couldn't get it to work. It literally had a blank page.
It felt over-engineered and they'd crow about speed improvements or some niche new whizz-bang feature or whatever for their new releases when I was there still just trying (and failing) to get what I feel is a totally fundamental basic feature working.
I also found creating a custom theme from scratch in Hugo quite complicated with archetypes or whatever they were called.
It felt like the project was more interested in the engineering challenge of the site generator rather than making something that is usable (which is totally 100% fine for them to choose that path) - after all directory listings seems like a basic feature to me yet it was apparently impossible without considerable fiddling around with _index files or other custom nonsense. Everything just felt a little bit more complex and laborious than it should have been to get a simple 4 or 5 layer site up and running exactly the way I wanted it.
I am sure that if I kept at it and kept trawling the support forums and posting questions and hanging out on IRC someone could have helped me ... but life is too short for that and I've got things to do so it just wasn't worth fighting with.
Jekyll on the other hand is super-simple and I was able to port entire sites - complete with a from-scratch custom theme + CSS - in under a day, and have them look and act exactly how I wanted.
I only picked Hugo over Jekyll originally as at the time I was a fan of golang, so I was not really that wedded to Hugo for another reason.
E.g. just getting a simple child page listing at "domain.com/something/" to automatically list all child pages took hours and hours and I still couldn't get it to work. It literally had a blank page.
It felt over-engineered and they'd crow about speed improvements or some niche new whizz-bang feature or whatever for their new releases when I was there still just trying (and failing) to get what I feel is a totally fundamental basic feature working.
I also found creating a custom theme from scratch in Hugo quite complicated with archetypes or whatever they were called.
It felt like the project was more interested in the engineering challenge of the site generator rather than making something that is usable (which is totally 100% fine for them to choose that path) - after all directory listings seems like a basic feature to me yet it was apparently impossible without considerable fiddling around with _index files or other custom nonsense. Everything just felt a little bit more complex and laborious than it should have been to get a simple 4 or 5 layer site up and running exactly the way I wanted it.
I am sure that if I kept at it and kept trawling the support forums and posting questions and hanging out on IRC someone could have helped me ... but life is too short for that and I've got things to do so it just wasn't worth fighting with.
Jekyll on the other hand is super-simple and I was able to port entire sites - complete with a from-scratch custom theme + CSS - in under a day, and have them look and act exactly how I wanted.
I only picked Hugo over Jekyll originally as at the time I was a fan of golang, so I was not really that wedded to Hugo for another reason.
I feel the same way about Moodle as you do about DocuWIki...
it's brittle, and the updates aren't semvar-- a minor verions upgrade could ereally hose you.
But with WP, the WP 5.5 thing where they killed the automatic jQuery migrate inclusion was about the only time in the last year or so when I was caused serious problems by an update (for context, I manage around 500 WP installs for gov/large businesses and a univeristy).
There was a pretty bad security issue with a popular file manager plugin, but we council folks to stay away from those solutions anyhow.
I feel like in general the ecosystem has gotten a lot better about the update system.
it's brittle, and the updates aren't semvar-- a minor verions upgrade could ereally hose you.
But with WP, the WP 5.5 thing where they killed the automatic jQuery migrate inclusion was about the only time in the last year or so when I was caused serious problems by an update (for context, I manage around 500 WP installs for gov/large businesses and a univeristy).
There was a pretty bad security issue with a popular file manager plugin, but we council folks to stay away from those solutions anyhow.
I feel like in general the ecosystem has gotten a lot better about the update system.
FYI: Netlify has a trademark on JAMSTACK and strictly controls it. They have a very weak profitability model and over 120 million dollars of early Series VC raises.
Netlify is a company working hard to get lots of people locked into their companies ecosystem. This is a very bad thing for the open web.
Netlify is a company working hard to get lots of people locked into their companies ecosystem. This is a very bad thing for the open web.
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They host static web pages. I’m not exactly seeing the angle on how this is a bad thing.
A lot of what is great about netlify and the jamstack is that it doesn't lock you in. Migrating away from WordPress means a new codebase. Migrating away from netlify just means putting my files somewhere else.
Netlify is semi-anonymously creating hype and then offering what they think is the best solution to the problem they’ve created.
The principles behind JAM are platform-agnostic though.
As I see it, Netlify is just dressing serverless in a new hat.
The principles behind JAM are platform-agnostic though.
As I see it, Netlify is just dressing serverless in a new hat.
How can you "lock" someone into an ecosystem that's literally just a bunch of open standards and an architectural pattern? Heck, my own Jekyll-based static blog is technically a "JAMstack" website and I've never had any interactions with Netlify.
What are you implying?
What are you implying?
Then you don't have a JAMSTACK website. You have a static + serverless architecture. Netlify is heavily promoting "JAMSTACK" as the next hot thing because only they are allowed to provide a "JAMSTACK" platform.
If enough people use it, and if they don't defend their trademark enough, it'll probably get genericized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
So you claim is they're trying to create "lock-in".
That has a specific meaning whereby they prevent customers from leaving, somehow, but forcing everyone onto their platform.
As far as I can tell, the basis for this claim is that somehow the "jamstack" label is so valuable that people will be "forced" to work with Netlify so they can enjoy the privilege of using that trademarked term, but you'll forgive me if I find that to be a pretty weak basis upon which to levy such a strong claim.
Ultimately, again, this is just an architectural pattern and a bunch of open standards. Netlify is absolutely guilty of hyping the holy heck out of this thing as though it's the silver bullet that'll solve all of the world's problems. And sure, maybe they're trying to build a brand around it.
But I fail to see how any of this is so nefarious as to qualify as attempted "lock-in".
That has a specific meaning whereby they prevent customers from leaving, somehow, but forcing everyone onto their platform.
As far as I can tell, the basis for this claim is that somehow the "jamstack" label is so valuable that people will be "forced" to work with Netlify so they can enjoy the privilege of using that trademarked term, but you'll forgive me if I find that to be a pretty weak basis upon which to levy such a strong claim.
Ultimately, again, this is just an architectural pattern and a bunch of open standards. Netlify is absolutely guilty of hyping the holy heck out of this thing as though it's the silver bullet that'll solve all of the world's problems. And sure, maybe they're trying to build a brand around it.
But I fail to see how any of this is so nefarious as to qualify as attempted "lock-in".
Why? If they drop their free tier or do something evil, I'll just start pushing my static files elsewhere. Why is that a bad thing?
Even their serverless functions api and DB can be connected to any serverless provider.
Even their serverless functions api and DB can be connected to any serverless provider.
Trademark usually is the least of worries, they opensource a bunch of their efforts, I personally contributed to some of their projects as do many others. Of course portability of services isn't completely stellar with Netlify.
But I admit that the hype will eventually die up and someone else would be able to trademark their model of simple stupid website publishing, hey I guess I should do just that. SSWP here we go!
But I admit that the hype will eventually die up and someone else would be able to trademark their model of simple stupid website publishing, hey I guess I should do just that. SSWP here we go!
I don’t want to use npm at all. Hundreds of megabytes of packages and I don’t know what they all do. WordPress I can run with a few minimal packages from my OS/distribution and then use the built in update mechanism for WordPress itself.
Mullenweg is right. Wordpress is a great content management system. From a content writer's perspective, it is perhaps the best way to write and publish content. And it does offer a simple, integrated solution.
But Biilmann is also right. The Javascript world (React, Vue, the npm ecosystem, ES6/7+), modularized services like Stripe, Algolia, etc, plus eg Git, have passed the Wordpress development ecosystem by.
Wordpress needs a bridge to modern development, so people can get the best of both worlds. That's how we see Gatsby, so we built a source plugin to import content, built Gatsby Cloud to do live content previews, created incremental builds to match the instant content go-live experience.
There's a great quote from Jason Bahl, the maintainer of WPGraphQL, on this: "I don’t see Jamstack competing against WordPress. This isn’t a zero sum game. If the Gatsby + WordPress experience can allow users to use the best CMS in the world while using modern dev tooling, it’s a win all around.”
https://wptavern.com/matt-mullenweg-and-jamstack-community-s...
But Biilmann is also right. The Javascript world (React, Vue, the npm ecosystem, ES6/7+), modularized services like Stripe, Algolia, etc, plus eg Git, have passed the Wordpress development ecosystem by.
Wordpress needs a bridge to modern development, so people can get the best of both worlds. That's how we see Gatsby, so we built a source plugin to import content, built Gatsby Cloud to do live content previews, created incremental builds to match the instant content go-live experience.
There's a great quote from Jason Bahl, the maintainer of WPGraphQL, on this: "I don’t see Jamstack competing against WordPress. This isn’t a zero sum game. If the Gatsby + WordPress experience can allow users to use the best CMS in the world while using modern dev tooling, it’s a win all around.”
https://wptavern.com/matt-mullenweg-and-jamstack-community-s...
This bridge already exists. The latest versions of the WordPress post editor are built almost entirely in React. Why do you think Facebook backed down from the BSD+Patents React license scheme they were trying a couple years ago? Because of pressure from WordPress!
I don't like WordPress, but Jamstack will never overtake WordPress adoption quite simply because Jamstack is too complicated.
In particular, it will never find an audience among non-technical users which is a very different audience from technical users who often think only of their own likes and needs.
If you don't like WordPress, there are more modern CMS apps with modern coding practices (often written in PHP). They aren't part of the Jamstack and but are often much simpler to deploy.
In particular, it will never find an audience among non-technical users which is a very different audience from technical users who often think only of their own likes and needs.
If you don't like WordPress, there are more modern CMS apps with modern coding practices (often written in PHP). They aren't part of the Jamstack and but are often much simpler to deploy.
Jamstack needs to smooth out the client side of the experience.
Netlify CMS has been great in testing, but I haven't deployed anything to a client with it. I know that, as a dev, I'll never get stuck in a situation where I can't accomplish something with Jamstack (Gridsome is the one I prefer). I just fear the day a client needs to use a CMS and they can't edit/demo something the way the expect.
Netlify CMS has been great in testing, but I haven't deployed anything to a client with it. I know that, as a dev, I'll never get stuck in a situation where I can't accomplish something with Jamstack (Gridsome is the one I prefer). I just fear the day a client needs to use a CMS and they can't edit/demo something the way the expect.
I simply can’t recommend a self-hosted Wordpress install for most users.
The vast majority of users that WP caters to are better served by Facebook Pages, Wix, Squarespace and Webflow.
Large and high traffic sites aren’t a great fit for WP either as the codebase was never meant for scalability and still maintains a painful developer expierence.
There are plenty of options, “JAMStack” included, that are still a much better fit.
The vast majority of users that WP caters to are better served by Facebook Pages, Wix, Squarespace and Webflow.
Large and high traffic sites aren’t a great fit for WP either as the codebase was never meant for scalability and still maintains a painful developer expierence.
There are plenty of options, “JAMStack” included, that are still a much better fit.
All these people who "miss Wordpress"...have they ever worked on a WP site that wasn't just modifying an existing theme and installing a handful of common plugins?
Most sites I work on these days are either simple enough to be solved with no-code solutions, or complex enough that Wordpress is going to hold you back.
Most sites I work on these days are either simple enough to be solved with no-code solutions, or complex enough that Wordpress is going to hold you back.
Yeah, I've seen the ideal fit for WP sites shrinking over the past 5 years. In my mind, the ideal fit is a business who needs some custom workflow/development that isn't easily attainable on the hosted platforms, but going full custom dev is also too expensive. $10M/yr business or less essentially.
Granted, in most of the world, that's still a huge swath of businesses, but most of them realistically don't need a heavily customized online presence. Professional services are a great example of potentially higher revenue businesses that don't need a fully custom web presence. In competitive markets, I've seen plumbing firms/electricians/pest control all compete for SEO, thus spending more on web dev services, but they're the minority.
I work for a company that specializes in E-Commerce, with a narrower focus on high performance WooCommerce and custom Shopify development. We've seen some enterprise level customers start on WP and Woo for an MVP and then spend half a decade working to get off of it to their own in-house stack, or to transition to a more managed platform like Shopify. Each one has it's ups and downs, but by no means is any one a silver bullet. It largely depends on what your business requirements are and the expectations of your customers.
Selling a dozen individual SKUs with limited customization? Shopify is fantastic and has an extremely optimized checkout flow.
Need more customizations to the checkout or you want to create extremely customized user experiences for interactions like Add-to-cart? WP might be a better fit since you can control the entire stack. But WP doesn't scale as easily as Shopify (though it can scale, that's our job) so you'll pay a premium to develop the platform to handle that scale.
Outside E-commerce, I see a lot of potential for WP in the higher ed space still. Community colleges and trade schools especially as you can work towards a unified branding effort, while still providing customization and flexibility for teachers. I know a few colleges that keep a small staff of less than 5 people, who manage web development and maintenance for decent sized institutions.
All that I guess to say, is that WP still has a place, but that it's shrinking in scope, despite the increase in actual usage numbers. Only time will tell if the trend stays positive for another decade, or if we start to see a slip as other offerings continue to improve and mature.
Granted, in most of the world, that's still a huge swath of businesses, but most of them realistically don't need a heavily customized online presence. Professional services are a great example of potentially higher revenue businesses that don't need a fully custom web presence. In competitive markets, I've seen plumbing firms/electricians/pest control all compete for SEO, thus spending more on web dev services, but they're the minority.
I work for a company that specializes in E-Commerce, with a narrower focus on high performance WooCommerce and custom Shopify development. We've seen some enterprise level customers start on WP and Woo for an MVP and then spend half a decade working to get off of it to their own in-house stack, or to transition to a more managed platform like Shopify. Each one has it's ups and downs, but by no means is any one a silver bullet. It largely depends on what your business requirements are and the expectations of your customers.
Selling a dozen individual SKUs with limited customization? Shopify is fantastic and has an extremely optimized checkout flow.
Need more customizations to the checkout or you want to create extremely customized user experiences for interactions like Add-to-cart? WP might be a better fit since you can control the entire stack. But WP doesn't scale as easily as Shopify (though it can scale, that's our job) so you'll pay a premium to develop the platform to handle that scale.
Outside E-commerce, I see a lot of potential for WP in the higher ed space still. Community colleges and trade schools especially as you can work towards a unified branding effort, while still providing customization and flexibility for teachers. I know a few colleges that keep a small staff of less than 5 people, who manage web development and maintenance for decent sized institutions.
All that I guess to say, is that WP still has a place, but that it's shrinking in scope, despite the increase in actual usage numbers. Only time will tell if the trend stays positive for another decade, or if we start to see a slip as other offerings continue to improve and mature.
Wordpress is fine if you're using wordpress.com edit: not .org (though I usually push webflow).
Hosting it yourself is a mistake. Not because it's inherently insecure (the base install isn't) but because no one can control themselves with plugins.
There's an entire cottage industry revolving around wpscan and securing/popping the millions of poorly secured wordpress instances floating around.
Hosting it yourself is a mistake. Not because it's inherently insecure (the base install isn't) but because no one can control themselves with plugins.
There's an entire cottage industry revolving around wpscan and securing/popping the millions of poorly secured wordpress instances floating around.
We self-hosted dozens of WP sites for years. It definitely requires careful attention to keep it secure and performant. As you say, one important factor was to carefully control plugins. As an in-house team, we were able to manage these on behalf of our colleagues rather than allowing a free-for-all.
We switched our WP hosting to WP Engine a couple years ago and have been happy with that.
We switched our WP hosting to WP Engine a couple years ago and have been happy with that.
Surely you mean wordpress.com.
Also, millions of people host WordPress themselves and it works fine considering how much value it delivers.
Also, millions of people host WordPress themselves and it works fine considering how much value it delivers.
It you just want to throw up a semi static site with a couple updates a year, sure. Go nuts.
The moment marketing wants to be able to login to make dynamic updates and load the instance up with plugins it's time to outsource the hosting. My team already has too much going on to spend time on this foolishness.
This got especially worse with 5.x since you can't 403 the REST API off the corporate network anymore (aka the REST API that shipped vulnerable on day 1). It's used for customer facing 'stuff' now.
The moment marketing wants to be able to login to make dynamic updates and load the instance up with plugins it's time to outsource the hosting. My team already has too much going on to spend time on this foolishness.
This got especially worse with 5.x since you can't 403 the REST API off the corporate network anymore (aka the REST API that shipped vulnerable on day 1). It's used for customer facing 'stuff' now.
We host several hundred WP sites as part of our client work... it's not super hard, but then I also have a lot of experience doing it.
There are plenty of commercial hosts at all price points that manage this stuff.
There are plenty of commercial hosts at all price points that manage this stuff.
This is the real problem, Wordpress doesn't care about security. Why can a bad plugin own your entire site? Why aren't half the security options for xss protection available, let alone built in. Seems impossible to automatically add hashes for 3rd party code, not use inline css, etc
So, so many small and medium businesses online leaking the private customer information because of poorly made plugins. Nothing can shame them enough and the easiest solution is that they should stop using Wordpress plugins, and in that case it's better to use something else entirely.
Crazy opinion. Thing is that if you have such problems you maybe shouldn't use WP. Well IMHO in general I wouldn't recommend WP because of this whole mess with plugins to gain some functional enhancement. I would recommend some CMSs which have a good core functionality by default.
I use netlify and will never go back to wordpress. Enterprise devs are also focused on jamstack so the shiny new stuff will start there. That doesn't mean that wordpress isn't needed but its plugin features may also be it's greatest strength and weakness.
What's the average use case for WP these days?
Shopify has probably eaten all the WP ecommerce sites.
Blogging has probably moved to Medium, Substack, static sites, etc.
Shopify has probably eaten all the WP ecommerce sites.
Blogging has probably moved to Medium, Substack, static sites, etc.
E-commerce is weird. I work for an agency that specializes in both Woo and Shopify and we've counseled certain clients to move to the other platform, depending on their business goals and requirements.
Shopify is great for a simple business model with little hands on requirements and pushes towards low friction checkouts.
Woo is less optimized to scale out of the box (this can be tweaked to scale easily enough), but you have entire stack available to you. It's just PHP and MySQL at the end of the day, so anything is possible. This allows you to build more custom experiences depending on what type of products you're selling.
Think of a local t-shirt store. They might start on Shopify, selling their shirts for the local sports teams and tourist attractions, but as they grow, they move into selling custom branded clothes using a printer in their back office. They might transition to WordPress to build a more customized checkout flow, where a user can upload various design files (in a variety of formats: svg, ai, pdf, etc), tweak them on a model and then start a back and forth conversation with the shop owner if there are problems. All that can happen in their account and customizable. That sort of custom experience just isn't possible on Shopify without jumping through some absolutely ridiculous hoops (hosting a separate API and then running an SPA in your shopify theme, etc).
All that to say, it depends :)
Shopify is great for a simple business model with little hands on requirements and pushes towards low friction checkouts.
Woo is less optimized to scale out of the box (this can be tweaked to scale easily enough), but you have entire stack available to you. It's just PHP and MySQL at the end of the day, so anything is possible. This allows you to build more custom experiences depending on what type of products you're selling.
Think of a local t-shirt store. They might start on Shopify, selling their shirts for the local sports teams and tourist attractions, but as they grow, they move into selling custom branded clothes using a printer in their back office. They might transition to WordPress to build a more customized checkout flow, where a user can upload various design files (in a variety of formats: svg, ai, pdf, etc), tweak them on a model and then start a back and forth conversation with the shop owner if there are problems. All that can happen in their account and customizable. That sort of custom experience just isn't possible on Shopify without jumping through some absolutely ridiculous hoops (hosting a separate API and then running an SPA in your shopify theme, etc).
All that to say, it depends :)
Thanks for your input!
What? woocommerce is viewed as next step from Shopify and Medium/Substack is basically graveyard at this point
> woocommerce is viewed as next step from Shopify
Is it? I honestly thought it was they other way around.
> Medium/Substack is basically graveyard at this point
This is definitely not true. Just look at how many Medium articles are shared to HN daily:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Is it? I honestly thought it was they other way around.
> Medium/Substack is basically graveyard at this point
This is definitely not true. Just look at how many Medium articles are shared to HN daily:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Plenty of use cases, especially if you want to maintain control over your digital presence instead of handing everything over to third parties.
- Ecommerce store via WooCommerce
- Online Course via Learndash LMS
- Lead Generation/Capture via WPForms, or other plugins.
- Ecommerce store via WooCommerce
- Online Course via Learndash LMS
- Lead Generation/Capture via WPForms, or other plugins.
We do a lot of customer-facing CMSs using it. We're rebuilding the Social Security Admin's customer-facing blog system... it's already WordPress, but we are building out additional functionality and creating a more accessible theme in addition to some other work.
We have quite a few NGOs and large enterprises which we do that kind of work for.... it's a very popular and easy to use system for non-technical users who need to manage content.
We have quite a few NGOs and large enterprises which we do that kind of work for.... it's a very popular and easy to use system for non-technical users who need to manage content.
> Blogging has probably moved to Medium, Substack, static sites, etc.
Where are you getting this information? WP is an order of magnitude larger than all of them combined for blogging. Matt Mullenweg's 50% market share goal isn't crazy hyperbole.
Where are you getting this information? WP is an order of magnitude larger than all of them combined for blogging. Matt Mullenweg's 50% market share goal isn't crazy hyperbole.
I don't have any numbers to share, it's just my anecdotal impression.
I'm working on a platform for content creators (including blogging) so whenever I visit a blog I check the source code to see what they're using. It's not so often that I come up with a WP site to be honest, although I'm obviously biased in my interests.
> Matt Mullenweg's 50% market share goal isn't crazy hyperbole.
I agree, although it seems (again anecdotal impression) WP is a lot more common as a general purpose CMS.
I'm working on a platform for content creators (including blogging) so whenever I visit a blog I check the source code to see what they're using. It's not so often that I come up with a WP site to be honest, although I'm obviously biased in my interests.
> Matt Mullenweg's 50% market share goal isn't crazy hyperbole.
I agree, although it seems (again anecdotal impression) WP is a lot more common as a general purpose CMS.
I follow hundreds of blogs through RSS. I'd say ~80+% run on WordPress, conservatively?
> Even rebuilding sites in Jamstack harkens [sic] back to the Movable Type days, where the bigger your site gets, the slower it is to rebuild or update templates."
Oh I remember that. But that was before the era of SSD and Multicore CPU. And Echoing all the other comments, the two system ( at its current form ) aren't even targeting the same market.
Oh I remember that. But that was before the era of SSD and Multicore CPU. And Echoing all the other comments, the two system ( at its current form ) aren't even targeting the same market.
I'm not so confident anymore about WordPress's future ever since Gutenberg got integrated.
Jamstack is nice locally but doesn’t have a solid solution to something simple like comments.
WordPress is horrid to develop with locally but can do almost anything.
Choose your poison.
Choose your poison.
Most static site generators seem oriented towards blogging/publishing content. Is there an open-source static page builder like Wix?
I’m working on this: https://primo.af But it’s more like a Wix for developers
Wordpress or JAMstack? Why not do both?
I did... as an experiment for my blog: https://www.louiechristie.com/blog/
The secret sauce is https://github.com/henrikwirth/gatsby-starter-wordpress-twen...
I did... as an experiment for my blog: https://www.louiechristie.com/blog/
The secret sauce is https://github.com/henrikwirth/gatsby-starter-wordpress-twen...
Oh look free marketing for both of them
I've been a WP developer for more than 10 years and have had enough.
I'm doing what I can to persuade clients that WP isn't the only solution, and that CMS's like Statamic and frameworks like Laravel can be a viable and cost effective solution.
I'm doing what I can to persuade clients that WP isn't the only solution, and that CMS's like Statamic and frameworks like Laravel can be a viable and cost effective solution.
Are any of those platforms ready yet for everyone to use? I feel like we're getting closer, and devs and most designers probably can leave WP behind, but if I have a friend who wants a site and I don't want to ever touch it for them, I'm not sure I know of a non-WP option that is ready for that.
Ghost, maybe?
Ghost, maybe?
Hugo, jekyll, webflow, wordpress.com, I'm sure there are others.
Good luck getting businesses to manage hugo or jekyll on their $10 hosting.
The request was for something they could setup and not look at. If it's a throwaway site that's what I use (usually backed by s3/cloudfront). Costs pennies and can be ignored for years without issue.
Contentful is great for content management
Ghost needs the developer momentum that WP and other PHP frameworks got.
I last used it in 1., and picked it up 2 weeks ago when I found myself needing a headless CMS.
I got a sense from the new features since 1. that it's moving towards a membership system which might not be relevant for many websites.
In terms of an editor and a way to expose content, is good enough; but like I say with more developers, this could bring more hands to implement stronger plugin systems and improve the core editing options.
I last used it in 1., and picked it up 2 weeks ago when I found myself needing a headless CMS.
I got a sense from the new features since 1. that it's moving towards a membership system which might not be relevant for many websites.
In terms of an editor and a way to expose content, is good enough; but like I say with more developers, this could bring more hands to implement stronger plugin systems and improve the core editing options.
For non-technical people who just want to create content, I'd recommend a hosted service, like Squarespace, Wix, etc. Even wordpress.com if they want something relatively simply and 'bloggy'.
I've stopped recommending the self-hosted (wordpress.org) version to non technical people (even if it's a 1 click hosting platform), because there are just too many things that can go wrong, particularly with plugins.
As a developer, my experience with Statamic and Laravel has been joyful, compared to WP.
I've stopped recommending the self-hosted (wordpress.org) version to non technical people (even if it's a 1 click hosting platform), because there are just too many things that can go wrong, particularly with plugins.
As a developer, my experience with Statamic and Laravel has been joyful, compared to WP.
> but if I have a friend who wants a site and I don't want to ever touch it for them
I did this for a few friends, hosted them on my server, set up Wordpress. Worked for some but most found even Wordpres too complicated. I sent to them to Squarespace and they're happy with that, albeit paying a hefty enough monthly fee after the initial trial period. Not my problem though! washing my hands
I did this for a few friends, hosted them on my server, set up Wordpress. Worked for some but most found even Wordpres too complicated. I sent to them to Squarespace and they're happy with that, albeit paying a hefty enough monthly fee after the initial trial period. Not my problem though! washing my hands
Yeah, I basically spend most of my working days troubleshooting weird WP issues... gutenberg can't find taxonomies because when the site was developed the devs didn't add the tax to the REST API, etc.
I really wanted to like Gutenberg. I learned how to build blocks (and the f- me, they totally changed a ton of stuff about how that works).
At this point, I have some pretty deep knowledge about WP and how to make it do all kinds of funky stuff it shouldn't do... but holy hell if I could get the sales folks to start selling about any other CMS I'd do that in a heart beat.
But I'd still have 600 or so legacy WP sites to support. I'm grateful to have work, and WP can be a real shit show when you look at that many sites.
I really wanted to like Gutenberg. I learned how to build blocks (and the f- me, they totally changed a ton of stuff about how that works).
At this point, I have some pretty deep knowledge about WP and how to make it do all kinds of funky stuff it shouldn't do... but holy hell if I could get the sales folks to start selling about any other CMS I'd do that in a heart beat.
But I'd still have 600 or so legacy WP sites to support. I'm grateful to have work, and WP can be a real shit show when you look at that many sites.
Great, now they are on some unknown platform where trivial dynamic features are going to be expensive and difficult to implement.
I think that's why they specifically mentioned Statamic. Other MVC framework backed CMS's would work too. OctoberCMS comes to mind, and I'm sure there are others for Rails/Django.
Those would give you a modest plugin ecosystem to get stuff like form submissions, but also give developers an escape hatch for when something more custom is required.
Those would give you a modest plugin ecosystem to get stuff like form submissions, but also give developers an escape hatch for when something more custom is required.
Wordpress is not going away. As long as you don't have to code to use Wordpress, it will be easier and far more accessible for people that don't have a lot of money for a website to hire a web designer (lower skill, lower pay than developer).
Gatsby or another Jamstack client could build themes that don't require coding, similar to Wordpress, but I don't see it happening. Webflow is sort of doing that now by allowing designers to build websites without coding.
Ultimately, the debate is silly because Wordpress and Jamstack have two different use cases. Wordpress will probably become less popular for big companies, but it will still be very popular for your average small to mid-sized business.