We make our living from WordPress, so once in a while we take our head out of the sand and look around. As part of a different research that I was doing, I stumbled upon a big warning light.
Try it, to see what I’m talking about:
https://www.google.com/search?q=business+website
https://www.google.com/search?q=restaurant+website
https://www.google.com/search?q=website+for+my+hotel
Even though WordPress powers 25% of the Web, WordPress is nowhere to be seen in any of these results.
Today, clients find WordPress because Web agencies use and recommend it. But when clients already come to agencies with another platform in mind, this can quickly change. It’s happened before to other ex popular platforms.
The only way to reverse this trend and put WordPress back again in the mind of prospects is by getting together.
We’re trying to do our bit by launching a new WordPress Marketing podcast.
Are you interested in helping? Please leave your comments with your thoughts.
I’m interested
Great. Thanks for the support. Let’s see how many people are interested.
Great post Amir. I can’t remember ever seeing WordPress appear in any searches other than those related to “blogging platforms”.
Although most of my searches are technical in nature, I see a lot of opportunity there to pull new web developers to WordPress, and help keep them away from the competition.
There are a ton of local meetups and WordCamps – maybe they’d be interested in helping push this initiative?
Good idea. I have some thoughts, but everything requires the participation of our community. I’m very interested to see how much response we get to this post.
Well… with 25% wordpress should be powerful to survive…
Who cares about the other platforms… the webdesigners will not change their workflow only 1 customer wants another system.
Ok. I agree
Im interested too!
Interested
As a WordPress plugin developer, I support 100% WordPress.
I am also developing plugins to migrate:
– from Joomla to WordPress
– from Drupal to WordPress
– from SPIP to WordPress
– from Magento to WooCommerce
– from PrestaShop to WooCommerce
– and perhaps others to come
If I can help in other ways, please let me know.
Thanks Frederic. Your migration plugins are great. I’m looking to see how much interest we have before we can see what we can practically do together.
I’m interested.
Hi,
Though I can see your worry, I think the competition is the best marketing WP has. Most of my Clients don’t care to know or learn what platform I’m using, they just want their sites done looking beautiful.
So I think my clients may be part of a demographic Google trends isn’t telling you. Also, there are clients that run to agencies because they are tired of the lack of flexibility there is with these other “solutions”.
And let’s not even talk about pricing! Every feature may turn into an upgrade or may not even be available elsewhere. On top of that, most of these platforms are empty promises and clients only get the frustration of trying to build their website and look like nothing they hoped for.
I hope that what you’re seeing is true. I’ve been in the industry for a while. We developed for other CMS and saw them decline. I’ve been in Drupalcons (the parallels of WordCamps) and heard the project leads boasting about the strength of their communities and platforms. They’re mostly gone now. They were big so it’s taken almost a decade. Once this down-spiral begins, it’s hard to stop.
Drupal is one horrible platform, simialr to WordPress I a few things but at the same time not.
I think those of us in the field can keep educating clients about how wonderful WP is. It is so much easier for them to edit even!
Interested. But, what is your proposal? getting together?
The most logical place to properly promote WordPress is on wordpress.org. It’s a site with a huge ranking. All it needs is the right content and we’re all set. So, if we get enough support, I hope that the maintainers of WPORG would be interested and listen. This would be the simplest and best working solution to the marketing challenge of the platform. I hope it will happen.
If not, we the WordPress ecosystem, will need to create our own marketing site for WordPress and promote it together.
Now I’m listening.
I see WordPress.COM ads every time I decide to turn my TV on. I’m not sure what more marketing they need. PPC. Are also very active…
Yes, but WordPress.com is the commercial property of Automattic. It’s great that they market it. I haven’t seen WordPress.org in any searches, although it’s one of the top-authority sites on the web.
I feel that WordPress lost an important web niche: “The starters ones”. People who want to create a website for their business, without spending with web developers, will hardly pass the WordPress entry barrier. Which is: setup a basic website, find a good theme and customize it. This is a simple step for all of us, but it’s a complex one for them.
Meanwhile services like shopify, wix and weebly are far easy to start into, so users can easily build their websites there by their owns. When the times comes to get a “Pro” service though, are we getting to those people or are they just using what their services provides?
I agree that WP today is a lot more complex than it was a few years ago. It’s also more powerful with more options. I guess these two go together.
Complexity will arrive to every platform that becomes “feature rich”. What bothers me very much is that as a community, we’re spending a lot on building the platform and not enough on marketing it to end-users.
May laptop says “Intel inside”. Intel knows that I’m not going to by a processor and weld it in myself. But they still figured that they need to educate me, years ago, about the importance of choosing a laptop with the right processor. We should be doing the same about the right CMS for your website. I think.
Hey Amir, I think this also has to do with entrepreneurs wanting to do all by themselves and get overwhelmed reading about WordPress and end up using simpler and less powerful platforms. When the next entrepreneur asks for advice, he’s told about the new one and that spreads. We can all have good arguments and influence our clients decisions. So count me in, I’m interested.
There are a fair number of solo-entrepreneurs and small businesses I know that are using WordPress. But when it comes to e-commerce, recently more and more seem to be going to platforms like Squarespace or Wix because of the ease of putting together something that looks pretty and does e-commerce easily.
You mention participating in making things better, but I don’t see any detail. What are you suggesting?
My searches specifically returned Wix and Squarespace as well. They’re very active in online marketing. I’m seeing how much feedback we’ll get here and I’ll post an update in a few days. Thanks a lot for your support.
In addition to using WordPress for all our customers and partners, it is fundamental that WordPress is among the preferred platforms always, we have a great interest in keeping it and publicize it whenever you need.
Interested, my customers are using wordpress since 4-5 years ago and i keep offering WP as a good solution for new ones.
Interested.
I’m interested.
I’m interested!
I am in
I’m interested. I also think WordPress marketing is way behind BUT they are just getting started, they are qu’il y ramping up things. As other site builder and CMS have been doing content, SEO, paid advertising and marketing for years now, with huge budgets, this won’t be easy.
WordPress could start by unifying their content under their very strong domain WordPress.org, it will help gain organic visibility. They have so much authority ?
Let’s do this.
That’s my thinking as well. WPORG is a community site. It has a huge authority. I’d prefer to help there with content, rather than open another channel and split our efforts. It’s a community project and we’re the community. Now I’m looking how we can get involved.
I agree, of course, although we develop over other platforms, too.
Perhaps to be very important HOW we use WP, and how strong are we in front of customers demands.
Im interested too!
In general I think there is nothing wrong with this. A few years ago they used WordPress for almost everything. But what about all the small service providers and craftsmans, do they really need WordPress or a multilingual site that need Updates every week?
The competition is getting bigger. But that’s not bad at all. I think the whole ecosystem will grow on this.
I think that we should feel responsible for the marketing of our platform. The competition isn’t specifically trying to grow the pie. It’s targeting growing parts of what we’re making a living from.
Interested.
I’ve seem Joomla and Drupal both die slow, painful deaths (in terms of general popularity).
Don’t want WordPress (my livelihood) to follow same path.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=wordpress,drupal,joomla
Add Wix to your comparison and you’ll see the full picture.
Hey Amir,
in my perspective the problem is not that WordPress needs SEO / marketing to sustain itself. I think a complete shift in use-ability needs to be reconsidered. I know many people who dread working with WordPress because of its difficulty and learning curve. That is why you see Wix come up as the first result in your searches, not only because of marketing but because the platform appeals to those who want something easy to use. It is simple really. So unless WordPress can adapt to the competition it will sink in web 2.0 land while everyone else is on 4.0+.
I am and have been a WordPress user from the beginning and spent many years developing a similar online website platform so I know how extremely difficult it would be to make a big change. If I was WordPress, I would be working on a sister platform to better compete and I would be thinking seriously about transitioning all users to that platform leaving in place the ability to fully customize WordPress as it is now. Time for not only a re-brand but a do-over.
0.02.
Matt.
I’ve checked the Wix pages with Ahrefs. They’re on top because Wix folks took the time to write good content with on-page SEO. Then they created campaigns to generate links to these pages. It’s nothing organic and spontaneous, but a well executed marketing campaign. We can do this too.
The WordPress ecosystem is definitely in trouble. People stopped valuing what make it great. The true spirit of open source – the GPL license. If you look at the official WP Plugin repo you’ll find so many plugins that exploit the marketing power of the platform for their own gain without bothering to comply with the GPL license. Sadly, the repo is too popular to police itself properly and people are becoming more and more brazen / disingenuous these days as these offenses go unpunished.
Here’s a higher profile example, Elementor doesn’t follow the WP guidelines for the plugin repo and hasn’t been punished. Others see this and think if they get away with it then why can’t they. The repo grants some authors an “exception” because they’re too big to fail, they don’t want to deal with the negativity of enforcing their guidelines, etc
The only reason Elementor is on the plugin repo is for the free publicity and income potential. If they cared at all about the GPL or the WP community they would license their paid PRO plugin as 100% GPL as well.
Any WP Small business that’s worth supporting should also be on board with something like this if not this specifically: https://wpshout.com/you-can-now-sign-the-wordpress-developer-honor-code/
Elementor doesn’t care about the WP community (not really) but WPML very well might. At least, I’d give them the benefit of the doubt more than Elementor.