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 think that wordpress still have a future. Love WordPress 🙂
Yo creo que es una gran plataforma, con gran libertad para que terceros desarrolladores puedan crear plugins que potencian aún más la experiencia de trabajar en la misma. Cada vez resulta más fácil realizar cualquier tarea, incluso la de crear a través de cualquiera de los temas a elegir, una página web en cuestión de minutos. Entiendo que el descenso se debe a aquellas personas que necesitan un contexto menos profesional, y que desarrollan webs propias y que han sido atraidas por los propios servicios de hosting que ofrecen sus propias aplicaciones web, pero que no logran dar la misma experiencia profesional que WordPress.
We use in the sites of our clients, we love it. What is the proposal?
I am just a user, who takes care of a few websites for my own companies and friends. I am not a professional web designer. I came from Contao to WordPress. I learned WordPress myself, learning by doing. I am not able to handle any HTML or PHP-codes.
I manage a few websites with standard WordPress themes and one with Divi Pagemaker.
I think, Divi is a great tool especially for people who are not handling websites as a professional designer. It makes some things easier, especially for non-professionlas.
In my opinion, WordPress is a good free solution to set up a website. But I think that some functions could be improved as including the security of the registration procedure against malicious entries in order to find a gateway for spam.
The strength of WordPress are the many (too many?) Extensions that are proposed to improve the presentation or the administration functions of the sites.
I am ready to participate in any discussion on the means to be found for WordPress to modernize and consolidate its position among the leading web applications of the market.
I’ve seen people going for WiX, Squarespace, Shopify and the likes because of the marketing they do and the easy of setting up and building a simple site. Those platforms target a niche successfully, those who want drag and drop page building with simple requirements. However, when those sites grow beyond the capabilities of the page builder, these sites often end up trying to look for alternatives. WordPress is often the solution but migration is not easy and it might screw up a lot of their previous efforts.
Also, WordPress out of the box doesn’t seem like much. There are too many plugins doing similar functions in different ways. And some plugins spam you to pay for features, others scam you to pay for features it made you think came by default. The community needs to make it easier for the users instead of grabbing cash and forsaking the longevity of the platform and community.
@Amir: It is true, that a WordPress-domain is not in these results, but if you look on these websites you will find out, that some of them recommend WordPress to build your website with. (e.g. 5 steps to create your own business website)
The weird thing is, that I do not see my own comment and your reply… 😎 So I hope, this will be a reply to your reply.
Yup. But wouldn’t it be nice to use the huge voice of the WordPress project, so that it would appear in the first search results?
Do you know that wordpress.org has an authority similar to google.com and hundreds of time more than wix.com?
You’re right! WordPress is becoming the new joomla. It’s time to reinvent it like the Divi team did for the themes.
1. Beautiful design & easy to use for non-developers.
2. Performance for developers.
Take an eye on: https://en.orson.io
Keep me updated. Thanks
Please keep me up to date!
Br. Keijo
Avosorsa Oy
i love Wp but core joomla is more powerful. not so much plugin to add than wordpress…
Ok. What do you need?
I use WordPress for my clients sites because it is easy for them to use with a tutorial from me and they can take control of their site as a tool for their business.
The main problem with it that I tackle daily is the speed and how easy it is to become bloated. Security is not too much of a problem once you know how to set it up, but speed and loading times, getting a good page speed in google and dealing with caching is a nightmare. WordPress very easily overloads shared hosting resources with only a few plugins added and this really needs to be looked at for it to become the ‘go to’ web building tool. My clients are quite often self employed or small businesses, they don’t have the budget for anything more than basic shared hosting and WordPress should be able to work with this type of hosting. Adding WPML to this mix and there are serious speed issues.
I am a freelance web designer and developer and 9 websites out of 10 I build are based on WordPress.
It has its flaws but it is free, there are many quality plugins available and – most of all – my average client can learn to update the contents, unlike with Joomla! which is way more complicated.
I wonder what alternative exists today and, please, do not mention the platforms such as wix.com which generate cheap, poorly designed websites because the average user has no idea what good design and usability are – until a professional designer explains to them.
So I am not worried about the future of WordPress: it may not be fashionable but it is here to stay.
I’d focus on your own product and support first
Which we’re doing. But, sometimes we also need to look outside of our comfort zone and see what’s going on around.
Very interesting topic to discuss. Thanks for bringing it up, Amir!
First of all I think that the biggest issue of WP is not the marketing, because WP is not a tool for end customers, but for people/companies which build custom websites for end customers. That’s why WIX and similar platforms are not real competition for WP itself, but for the professionals who create custom websites and those who are developing different themes, builders and plugins for WP. The target audience is completely different.
Second we are talking about percentages, but not for real numbers. I am pretty sure that 25% of web in 2018 is times more than 75% in 2010.
I am more designer and less developer, and my personal opinion about the main issue working with WP is that every single plugin is completely different than the others – the logic behind, the settings of it, etc. The WP interface in general sucks. The whole backend is a horror for anyone who see it for the first time. And because every plugin or theme has their own interface and settings, without following any general rules, it’s hard to convince somebody who is running a hotel or a restaurant to use it. Beside of that I believe the competition is something which runs the evolution. All the builders which became popular in the last years made my work with WP way easier, faster and therefore more efficient. Their interface is also better. So in my opinion this is a step in a right direction. I think this is something which can be taken into consideration – how to make the work with WP easier for everybody.
I’m not so sure that no developers are making a living from Wix.
https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/browse/?q=wix&user_pref=2
Yes, a lot more from WordPress.
WP developer here. Everytime I speak with someone about WordPress, it’s the same story – people think WordPress has big security issues. I’ve fixed maybe hundreds of hacked WordPress sites, 99% of those were not updated at all.
As soon as I convince clients it’s not problem of WordPress, but problem of poor developers using it, they usually agree, that WP might be best solution for them, as it’s really easy (cheap) to develop custom functionalities and adjust WP to suit almost any scenario.
As for WPML, yes, it’s really complicated for the clients to use, and while I can see WPML team is trying to make the workflow more streamlined, it’s still a long way.
Thank you for your feedback. We would love to get any specific feedback that you have about our UI or workflow, so we can improve.
Wix y GoogleSite son plataformas muy sencillas que les vienen bien a usuarios domésticos y microempresas. Es un esfuerzo que debemos hacer: Yo acepto el reto.
I’m in!
I think you’re worries are ungrounded.
WordPress thanks it’s success to webbuilders (web agencies and freelancers).
No serious web builder is going to use Wix to build a website.
You sound like a marketing person who knows nothing about how website are really build. I find it disturbing that you are misusing the WPML mail platform to send stupid mails to your entire mail database.
WPML has just seriously sank in my estimation.
I apologize for offending you. If you don’t wish to hear from us, there’s an unsubscribe link in all our emails and you can also disable email notifications from inside your WPML account.
Greek WP community is strong and become bigger, but we need more people to support this. Why dont we make a global group for WP to get more support and upgrade for our favourite platform?
First of all, I would not have even touched wordpress, if my main client had not insisted.
Wordpress out of the box is a CMS hoax. There are some few worthy plugins like yours, that make life easier. Some time ago the market for wordpressthemes was very rich of good designs. But today every website has nearly the same layout and this advatage has gone. Don’t worry about the figures from google. What about your sales from the last years. Please show us this chart. WordPress will not fade away for a reason,that can be solved by arguing. Either it sucks so much that it deserves it, or an other “better” tool enters the market.
Movements like wordpress is today are to big to be controled.That is an illusion. This is my advice for you: Take all your knowledge about translation and development an build flexibel interfaces for upcoming flatfile and static cms solutions. If wordpress fails you have a new business, if not you have more business. And I have a good translation tool in other systems too.
Thumbs up!
I mean this a lot less confrontational than it may sound.
Dear WPML, have a look at your own workflow that you present in the WP admin area, and it is clear why a WP website with a dozen languages is not something businesses want to get in to.
Others here have said it already, even a small WP site needs quite a few plugins, each adding to confusion. But you add the mother(s) of all confusions. Sorry!
That said, I ponder the alternative right now for a client of mine and have not decided yet.
I am sure that translation always is complex to implement, but maybe you could re-invent yourself as your own website builder with translation baked in. Offering the best and most simple interface to reach the whole world.
We’re always looking for how to improve. If you have specific feedback about UI problems, I’d love to get it.
Hello, well, the biggest issue always was, that the translations are done in different places. That is even bigger issue with websites with WooCommerce / WPML / WCML.
It’s complicated to tell people: “Go to page edit screen, hit duplicate, switch to the language version, hit Translate independently, translate”. There should be a single button for this.
Also, the Strings translation has always been a big problem – “You have to first enable the admin strings in the ‘Admin texts to translate’ screen, after that they hopefully appear in the strings Translation for you to translate”. Ideally, it should be possible to translate all the strings directly on the admin pages they appear (some sort of JS injection should help with this)
I never really used the “Page builders” integration, as it did not work for me in the past – I might give it another shot.
WCML also has many problems – ie we are unable to set shipping prices per currency, it does not really support Product Addons etc.
If you want to discuss more, I’ll be happy to help – I’ve been using WPML forever and know, what clients are fighting with.
Count me in, keep me updated.
Cheers,
Alex.
Count me in, keep me updated
Cheers,
Alex
Wix, Jimdo & C are ok for small sites, and it’s also ok for me.
But developers need a solid foundation to build more complex and customized websites.
WordPress is concentrating too much on non-tech experience instead of speed-up the develoment of tools for developers (customizer, gutenberg etc). It still doesn’t natively support multi language, it doesn’t implemented any database abstraction, and so on.
In my opinion this is because development is driven by the needs of .com version instead of the community.
If I can contribute in some way, count me.
Thank you.
Francesco-