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Marketing In WordPress Sucks. Will You Help Fix It?

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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.

381 Responses to “Marketing In WordPress Sucks. Will You Help Fix It?”

  2. Hello
    This is not “one man battle”. WIX and Squarespace have aggressive marketing, you open a coca cola WIX jump out from it, you open a candy, WIX jump out…….etc.

    This is battle of every developer, this is battle of every hosting provider and if you ask me, all together, developers + host providers + all “strong” players in WP industry need to be involved. This is the only way. We need to be aggressive and we need to act together, developers + host providers + marketplaces. Today only aggressive marketing and aggressive advertisement can bring results. We need to be like WIX, you open a coca-cola WordPress jump from it, you open a beer, WP jump from it, you open a candy, WP jump from it.
    Now, there are many different ways how to do it, only aggressive act can bring a result, politics like “we have a good product and customers will understand” you can forget about it.
    You need to knock, you need to push, you need to be boring …… WIX didn’t arrive on the top of the scene because they wait that customers understand how good WIX is.

  4. I’m happy to see WordPress in decline – it’s legacy, spaghetti code that is outdated and a chore to maintain. If development is your bread and butter you need to move with the times – in the next 5 years PHP & MySQL based sites could be a thing of the past.

  6. thanks for sharing your thoughts Amir! I think the likes of wix not only do fill a gap in the market but also do show what wordpress is lacking. Building a micro website has become easy for everyone. Starting something does not mean anymore to build infrastructure but to create content. And that is a good development in my eyes. How many website projects would not even exist for lack of resources. Some of these outgrow wix Jimdo and co, and become potential clients for the WordPress community, others don’t.

    I am building WordPress pages as a designer. Just setting up a WP page and implementing basic standards requires a lot of know how and repetitive work. Securing and Maintaining it too. I think a better WordPress out of the box with page builder would do more wonders than payed ads.

    Performance is not really striking.
    You need lots of plugins even on a small Site. Performance is really slow after a few plugins and so every feature comes at a big cost.

    The backend becomes a mess. Inconsistent navigation use and ui of plugins. Notifications from plugins pop up everywhere, often up sell or cross sell spam. That sucks. The folks that do that really do ruin the party.

    So I agree with you that WP may become less popular without action. The level of ease of use is going up and WP could offer a more complete low level entry product, for non experts who want to build their site with options to get it taken to the next level by a professional if the project outgrows basics WordPress.

    What is your idea how we can support?

    • Totally agree with you Michael!

      WordPress can do so many things that the new page builders can’t… but the negative issues you mention are really starting to weigh the system down.

      I struggle to recommend WordPress to anyone nowadays… even though it’s the only system I will use for my own business, that gives me total control.

    • “I am building WordPress pages as a designer. Just setting up a WP page and implementing basic standards requires a lot of know how and repetitive work. Securing and Maintaining it too. I think a better WordPress out of the box with page builder would do more wonders than payed ads.

      Performance is not really striking.
      You need lots of plugins even on a small Site. Performance is really slow after a few plugins and so every feature comes at a big cost.”

      I absolutely sign this comment!

  8. I run an agency which builds WordPress websites for clients in the UK & US; WordPress is used on 99% of our projects. Many clients will only come with us with a very basic knowledge of what platforms there are out there – we then talk to them, educate them, and work out if we are a good fit for them (and WordPress).

    Most clients that come to me either have a WordPress site already, are open to a WordPress site, or have heard of (and even have experience of using), a WordPress site. If they haven’t heard of WordPress, fine – but I’ve certainly seem increased awareness amongst marketing departments in the last 5 years.

    I don’t think the marketing awareness of WordPress is a big issue. And I would not really expect to see WordPress appearing in the organic SEO for those search results (unless you are talking paid ads). But perhaps I’m not fully understanding what you are trying to achieve, keep me updated, best of luck (and thanks for WPML).

    Joel

  9. From a marketing and sales point I don’t really “sell” wordpress to my clients. I sell them a solution to their problems by providing them a platform the brings together all the services they need.

    I think we maybe targeting the wrong people. I think if developers knew and could present wordpress as the solution. then the client would buy into it.

    If your a DIYER then you are going to go through growing pains with every platform. But if wordpress can show you the promise land then you might think it’s worth it. I don’t deal with many DIYERs.

  12. WordPress has major security issues that are not easy to handle. But I love it and use it on the sites I develop.

  13. Can’t compete with Wix/SS/Weebly/etc on price and actually, the small businesses that use these low-end services don’t want to or can’t pay professional web dev prices, so I don’t want them as clients anyway. I’d rather wait for them to outgrow the self-build platforms and realise they need to actually pay money to get a decent business website

    • Wix is a profitable service, rapidly expanding and hiring like crazy. If they can be profitable at their price range, I’m sure that WP businesses, who harness open-source software, can compete. As a platform, I believe that Wix is years ahead in marketing themselves.

  17. I agree that WordPress could spend more effort in Marketing. But in the end WordPress has a worldwide market share of 30%. 30% of all websites are running on WordPress. I think this is the reason why not so many people google it. Every webdesigner building websites knows this CMS. He knows that and how the CMS works, he knows which Themes and Plugins he wants to use. So why should they google the keyword “WordPress”? For me this is not a sign of upcoming disinterest in this CMS but in enormous popularity.

    Sure, somebody who does not know about webdesign and thinks he could build his own professional website might probably not stumble over WordPress because other players are more aggressive in advertising. But this group just wants to build a small website with low budget. They won’t need WPML at all for their small website. This is not your target group.

    I personally have never seen a client who was coming to me saying “I want you to build a website with Wix/Squarespace or CMS XY. I don’t want anything else.”. If clients come to me they mostly have no idea about webdesign or web development. So I advise them what is the best solution. And for most of the small websites, WordPress is the best solution due to its flexiblity and number of ressources like theme and plugins. At the moment, I don’t find a CMS or service where I can build nice looking individual websites in such a low time which is still 100% flexible.

    Flexiblity is the main reason why I and many other webdesigners would never use Squarespace or Wix.

  18. Count me in!
    After a long part of my life working with other web technologies and platforms here in Portugal, for the last 6 years WP has been my major partner for new web project development and teaching. At the national learning center for journalists (Cenjor), WP has been the first choice when teaching about web development, web management and web writing, mostly to journalists and communication professional. And hundreds of them have discovered, loved and developed their own online project with WP.
    Again, count me in!

  19. Well, I can’t share this Experience. Here in Germany, bigger Companies tend to use Typo3, though this is more like some Kind of Agency-Bullshit … like almost all Advertising Agencies use Apple Computers, though not better, for it depends on the Software.

    And concerning all those cheap Designs on themeforest.net, it just needs some more Know-how, considering SEO and Stuff (Yoast SEO Plugin, Wordfence/iTheme Security, Total Cache/Supercache or whatsoever). I am ranking on Top Position here in my Town and many of other Agencies are using WordPress either, as one can see within the Source Code (wp-content… Paths).

    Some Agencies use Contao, but this is like the tiny Brother of WordPress.

    As said, only bigger Companies get a hard one by using Typo 3, thougt there’s a Lack of Usability. It’s like „it’s more expensive, must be better“ Thinking.

    Regards from Germany

    Chris

  22. The real great potential of WP is the rapidly to built a site. Costumer search that… Yes, it’s slow but now the ecosystem it’s really great.

  24. I only tried your first search (business+website) and WordPress is in these results (Top 10) at least three times!

    What kind of thread is this? It seemed to be interesting but then there was no substance at all in it… :-/

      • Please don’t forget that Google will always give you SERPS based on your history and personal data. To avoid that, you can add &pws=0 after your SERPS url. Then Google will give results without “being personal”.
        I’m affraid you won’t see any WordPress results in this case. 🙁

        Pieter
        WP designer for more than ten years and also a happy, paying WPML user.

    • Agreed, this is a really poorly thought out post, not a good reflection of the wpml team.

      • Could you share the search results that you’re getting for this term? You can see my search results here:
        https://www.screencast.com/t/OPTfpP73

        We did check this from 5 other countries, but we haven’t tested with all.

        Being a search expert yourself, I’m sure that you know that Google’s results are customized for logged-in users. You’re running these searches from an incognito mode and without being logged-in. Right?