That's IMO just a wrong understanding of the average business owner. Wordpress is much more useful to web agencies with the necessary skill set to heavily customise it than to the average Joe SMB Owner.

To them, Wordpress is just as much a black box as Wix or Squarespace is, and all the web agencies using Wordpress to make websites for that demographic modify it so much with so many mutually exclusive plugin pipelines that getting their website from one to another often involves a complete rewrite anyway, if you want meaningful changes done.

And for a long time, it was just the cost of doing business. But now? Nowadays, Squarespace et al. are probably a much better fit for them. Effectively the same vendor lock in if you're not a web agency yourself, but with much less overhead involved.

That’s why I’ve completely changed my position on who should be using what tech to build sites. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

I now recommend clients three options, based on the type of business:

1) If they’re a local small business (eg. Restaurant, flower shop) or solo creative business like a photographer or videographer, just do Squarespace. Wordpress is way too complex for their needs and they will easily shoot themselves in the foot.

2) If it’s a Saas company, tech startup, design agency, or enterprise, I strongly strongly recommend Webflow for their marketing site even though they think they want JAMstack. When the marketing team starts pulling dev time to redesign parts of the site every week, they immediately will regret the JAMstack decision.

3) if it’s a media/content business, always go Wordpress. Their employees will already be familiar with it, and the collaborative editing and SEO experience cannot be beat for publishing content on a daily basis. Combine this with plugins for newsletters and social integrations and the extra hassle of Wordpress is worth it for them.

* Only one person can edit code at a time - this caused us to have to split who was doing what and we even ended up losing work when someone overwrote someone elses changes https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-39 (this goes back to 2017)

* Tracking changes in VCS easily (https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-381) another from 2017, we tried out flowgater though in the end have just settled for exporting the code as is and then just committing it by hand.

* A max limit of 10k characters (edit - as pointed out in comment, that's per file, I think IIRC we had all our JS in one single place which is how we hit this our side) in site code (https://forum.webflow.com/t/embed-html-10-000-characters/443...) - this caught us on doing some embedding, we worked around it in the end and not a massive deal but still felt a little annoying having to work around it.

A brief investigation says it's 10K characters per file, but still how the hell does a web site enforce that? Sure seems arbitrary and silly.

For example, I work with a Saas company that has their designer throw together landing pages for competitor comparisons and integrations in like a day, and they change them weekly based on testing.

You just can’t do that on Wordpress at that speed without making a mess with heavy plugins and bloat.

There are sure builders that are as good as Webflow, but without losing WP power

Yeeeah but no. Companies (especially those ones) can have plenty of good reasons to need more control / custom code / integrations / etc. I think a lot of people don't realize how crippling and limiting committing to Webflow can be, and how much you end up hacking around it. Raises hand

https://www.plasmic.app gives you the same (actually, a FAR better) visual editor that plugs into whatever codebase you want. More people need to know about them.

Using Plasmic + JAMstack on a marketing site would be the worst of both worlds IMO. All the static site hassles with none of the stuff that makes static sites fun for me.

It gives design and marketing the ability to edit landing pages, but they still have to bug the engineers for bigger changes to the site structure.

The biggest advantage to Webflow is its super versatile CMS, and separate simplified editor for content teams. Our engineering team literally never has to touch anything on our main domain. Marketing/Design completely owns it. Our engineers focus entirely on our product.

Like all developer-centric tools coming out of the JAMstack ecosystem, Plasmic seems to ignore the existence of content marketing and SEO (Wordpress's writing experience and friendliness for non-devs is why they won the internet), which is the entire point of having a marketing site in the first place.

Just wanted to share that our main use case actually has been for marketing sites (apps are a minority) and giving content editors autonomy. We do spend a lot of time on page performance, SEO concerns, etc.

Publishing new pages and other site structure changes (and even publishing new sites) does not actually require bugging engineers. Letting marketers/designers own the site and freeing up developers is our entire focus.

We are also working on a simplified content editing mode that restricts design changes.

Appreciate your following along with our progress, and hope we can continue hearing your feedback - that's how we make the product better for you.

This (with a slight modification).

I built websites back in the Web 1.0 days. I know how to use HTML, CSS and a bit of javascript. When I needed to build a "brochure" site for my professional services business, I could have done it from scratch, I could have waded into the convoluted and plug-in dependent mess that is WP, or I could go to a simple tool like Squarespace or Wix. I am capable of learning anything I needed, but the real question is: when I need to update a page, do I want to relearn all that stuff I forgot because it isn't my day job?

When comparing Squarespace to Wix, I realized that Squarespace doesn't have backup and restore capability. That is a mindblowingly huge hole to me. So I went with Wix. Yes, I am "locked in" to Wix. If I wanted to go to another solution, I could pay someone pennies to replicate my existing site.

Contrast to my experience with WP. I inherited a WP site with the non-profit I work with. I ended up getting them to pay godaddy to manage the site and the SSL because I don't have the time to deal with it. I dread the day when the next WP upgrade breaks the janky WSIWG plug-in (elementor I think), which already doesn't work properly on one of the pages, so I have to edit the HTML. As soon as our long contract with godaddy expires, I am paying someone to replicate the site in Wix.

Like you pointed out in #3 above, I guess there are some applicable use cases for WP, but anyone who doesn't need more than a brochure site is ill served by that choice.

Absolutely. Unfortunately, tools create confirmation bias, and given WP's market share those voices are collectively the loudest.

The point being, the general perception is WP is *always* the solution for *every* need. And Automattic and other leaders with the WP "community" don't make much of an effort to change that.

I like WP. I use WP. ButI find the one size fits all attitude very annoying and ethically suspect.

We still use wordpress occasionally, but no longer for those customers.

Also agree re: lock-in. This is actually improving somewhat with Gutenberg, but transferring data from a WordPress site to another platform is still usually going to be a giant pain in the butt unless your content is extremely simple - no metadata, widgets, forms, custom blocks, etc.

But, then I look at my neighborhood and the 1,000 small-business WordPress sites, with blogs that have been abandoned in 2015, should be one-pagers and not seen an update since because their owners don't understand WordPress and also can't afford to pay someone for every small change and now they think the whole Internet is like that (40% as you say), and changing that is going to be one hell of an uphill battle.

I don't have to hate WordPress or knock their efforts to see ways to improve things with more modern approaches.

That's not a failing of WordPress. That's:

1. A failure of how the business owner just couldn't be bothered. Wordpress, Wix, Squarespace, there's a fairly good chance they'd fail at all of these. They won't pay for the design, marketing etc etc, and the reason why?

2. their business doesn't need a website e.g. local plumber or the only game in town for a specific vertical.

3. They're on their local Facebook groups and don't need anything more.

These folks also abandoned Yellow pages, Thomsons etc years ago but yet they survive through word of mouth. The internet and these other marketing services can't compete with that (especially outside certain confined bubbles). The local plumbing and heating guy in my area gets on fine without all the paraphernalia of "being on the web", as do all other trades.

Not everyone needs a "website", especially if they've a well developed funnel of incoming business that, by now in 2021, they still get on ok without needing to be internetized.

What does get these folks business without websites is other folks recommending them "on the internet", via local Facebook groups or whatever. Why would you waste time having a website when FB funnels the business to you, it's already job done.

Or, if you send me a message via the contact form and tick 'submit', you can sign up to our newsletter at the same time.

I'll split that out into a separate newsletter signup in the next few days.

Thanks so much for the kind words, much appreciated!

It's almost like HN has a large community of people who find setting up a static site simple and would find the technical constraints of WordPress offensive. People for whom WordPress is the wrong solution.

So now the question is - what should those people say about WordPress? Obviously they have no reason to praise it, so they will damn it, if you say they should not damn it because it is not for them then this raises that old HN question - why is this here? It's here because it would be of interest to Hackers, but it seems hackers would be the people most likely to dislike it.

It's here for the 15 minutes hate.

Most likely, but Hackers Spirit for me is also finding the right tool, for the right job.

Meaning for me, I allmost use vanilla JS and html only, because that way everything is under my control behaving exactly like I want it.

But I clearly see, that other people need a more convienient tool, to enable them to get things done, with their skillset. Why should I hate that?

Oh, but about hate - I really do hate PHP, so I could probably chime in with the choir.

But I know my hate comes from having to take over a half finished webproject, long ago, with badly written PHP and I was new to it. I never touched PHP ever since ... but I am aware, that other people get stuff done with it, so good for them.

that's been a combination of my experiences with pretty much every other tech as well.

I've done php, java, perl, python, javascript ruby, asp and poked at a small cold fusion project over the last 20+ years. Every one of those had baffling parts which, after some time, and after reviewing it with people far more proficient than me in that target stack, I learned it was "crap code". "Yeah, they didn't know what they were doing." "That's n00b code." "Garbage. How did they get hired?"

I've also seen some good 'clean' projects in some languages, but not as many. I guess I can not, for the life of me, figure out how someone looks at some bad PHP projects and writes off the entire language, yet if I do the about Python, for example, I'm somehow close-minded, or a n00b, or... "just not ready for it yet" or... something. Have had conversations like this at tech conferences (back when those were a thing!). Seems like projection going on, but maybe there's something more.

FWIW, it's often not specifically the language itself which is a stumbling block, but the entire ecosystem around a stack. If there's not a good, usable patterns and tools for easy testing, or integration between FE/BE, etc, I don't care how "tight" or "sleek" or "elegant" a specific language is; it's going to be a pain to deliver a full project with.

And since I care about that and there were alternatives - yes, I just wrote off PHP entirely ;)

After you've worked with perl for years, none of those sorts of criticisms against PHP seem to hold any water with me. ;)

The problem I see is that, in many instances, WP is pushed by dodgy developers running a template for what is a static site. This is easily the case for 90%+ of the small business sites I see. Many are never changed.

WordPress is a much larger attack surface than static hosting. There are fairly obvious ways of automating using WordPress to generate a static site that will be faster and more secure. I believe this is generally referred to as headless WordPress. Why does this not happen more – or do I just not see it when it does?

"Can you put our holidays on the main page?", "Can you adapt this text?", "We have a new image of our main shop, can you update it?", ...

I've seen plenty of people building a website for someone and thinking they made good money, but after all the requests that come afterwards, it's not worth the time.

These consultancies strike the right balance in terms of knowing their product, managing expectations, and knowing when to say "no".

It's created lots of jobs in South Africa for what that's worth. Can't speak for other countries.

WooCommerce began as a plugin by a wordpress theme company in South Africa (WooThemes). And then they were aquired by WP/Automattic in ~2015. A really cool case of pivoting.

imho the best part of WP is the dashboard stuff, so headless WP is a good choice. It's also frequently hurt by PHP's heavy push on inheritance, which can be at-odds with what is actually a very good events-based architecture in WP. Sad part is that the very good events-based architecture is so overlooked, most people who have spent time developing in WP aren't even aware it has events.

But! My company's website runs on WP nonetheless, mainly because I don't want to spend time on creating a website when I could work on our product. WP allows my less technical employees to tinker with the website and the marketing oriented folks to do whatever marketing oriented folks do.

It runs conveniently on its own isolated VM where people can bikeshed it all day long. If your website is not your primary product, I don't see the point in writing your own stuff unless you got some leftover time you're willing to sacrifice to write it in.

I'm attracted by static site generators essentially because I like the idea that no dynamic code is run when the website is visited, but WordPress almost gets you there after the first visit. Plus, you don't have to regenerate the whole website for each change, WordPress generates pages "lazily". So, maybe WordPress can be lighter in some cases than a statically generated website when considering everything if setup this way? It still requires a potentially stronger server than when everything is static.

What are the best resources that describe how to "do it well" in Wordpress? I've made several attempts to google, but due to the enormous popularity of Wordpress, and the low technical level of most of the users, the signal-to-noise ratio is incredibly poor.

Yeah I do do this.. for my personal site. If I did this for a client then they wouldn't be a client haha

It puts too much of a burden on the site owner from a security perspective.

Quite frankly, Wordpress leaks like a sieve. I wish this wasn't true because it is really one of the best/most accessible CMSs around. If they fix the security issues, it would just be wonderful.

Wordpress is pretty secure but putting everything in a shared hosting with lax security like dreamhost or hostgator et al its asking for trouble.

I have many wordpress sites, some large, some small, and only 1 was ever hacked and it was on a shared host 10+ years ago. Today I have sites that I haven't updated in 5+ years, no hacks no problems. Good wp depends on good server config and good wp setup.

This is because WordPress is the equivalent of PHP. Sure it can do the job but there's a very big BUT in there, always.

The only reason I switched to Hugo is because I wanted custom domain + javascript (for adding some embeds that wordpress doesn't support by default), and I didn't want to pay 8 bucks (I think 10 CAD) for that on .com, and didn't want the hassle to host on Amazon anymore.

But I surely miss being able to have all my drafts available everywhere, and publish with the click of a button.

EDIT: I also miss that all other bloggers from my circle except another one, all use wordpress, and follow each other on the wordpress reader, and comment using wordpress comments. I'm likely missing a good chunk of views and comments because of that

And no, I don't use it either.

The comparable replacement for Wordpress isn't a static site but something like Ghost: https://ghost.org/

But it is outdated and I offered a better alternative as an example of why Wordpress receives so many negative reactions at this point.

Are you aware WooCommerce is an ecosystem in itself?

At the end of the day, regardless of other usability and adoption merits, it’s just a really poorly designed architecture.

Of course that would be ideal development-wise. Business-wise, I doubt most agencies or small teams are going to rewrite W3 Total Cache, Yoast, WooCommerce, Elementor, ACF, Gravity Forms and all the top popular plugins... not to mention all the battle-tested security options.

To be fair, every time there is a WP post on HN, there is also always the inevitable comment complaining about the "haters" and to just think of the "business owners" tangent.

Then there is my comment - now it is like the movie inception :P

It would be nice if we all just used those tools/software that works for us and simply ignore the rest.

Which, as I say, is the same for Every Bit Of Software Ever.

Like, consider this: your friends PC gets hacked and he loses everything. Turns out they were running ‘doze 95 and had failed to update or backup. Where is your sympathy? Right, you’re thinking “you’re a fool!”. And you’re right. They failed to look after their stuff, and it created a problem.

Why is this any different with WordPress?

Do it well, and the “security for Wordpress is pretty bad” trope just goes away.

But... we started this thread with 'WordPress isn't for you, the alternative isn't a static site and a CI pipeline', so it's supposed to be for people who don't know what they're doing, often do use $50 a year hosting that comes with 'cPanel', keep installing different plugins until one kind of does what they want and then leave all the others, and never update anything until something breaks/they want something new and they start installing plugins again.

I've had customers using WP in the past, and defacement was just part of the routine. It's an annoyance for the business owner for sure, but so are personnel issues, finance, legislation changes, etc.

For most businesses, there are more important issues than having a perfectly optimised and hardened website.

WP, as bad as it is, is 'good enough' for most websites.

So yeh, I take your point, but it's the peripheral stuff that makes this important IMO.

Do you buy the best dishwasher or do you buy the good enough one?

You're allowed to dislike it, but for me windows 10 is a great OS with a thin removable layer of crap sprayed on top, and more importantly it's just the right balance between osx and linux.

To each his own, but you shouldn't be making such generalizations, especially in a message telling people not to make generalizations.