WordPress has serious problems to solve

WordPress is the most widely used open source content management system (CMS) in the world. As of March 2022, the CMS powers approximately 43.3% of websites worldwide, including The New York Times, Spotify, TechCrunch, and the official White House website.

Now, for the first time since its inception in 2003, WordPress’ market share has dropped slightly to 42.9%, according to Data published by w3techs.com.

“For maybe 25 years I’ve been saying it’s ‘WordPress or nothing’. Now? Hardly. I don’t care,” mentioned Chris Brogan, chief of staff at Appfire.

On the other hand, Shopify and Wix saw their market share increase to 4.3% and 2.3%, respectively.

In the cards

WordPress is built on PHP and MySQL. Today, developers prefer a different approach to PHP. Former marketing and communication manager at WordPress, Joost De Valk, mentioned“The moment I feared to come has come. WordPress market share is shrinking.

Discussions around the usability of WordPress have been going on for quite some time in the WordPress community, and it’s no surprise that its market share is on the decline.

In a blog post, Joost De Valk said that in about a year, sites on Wix and Squarespace, on average, improved their site speed more than WordPress sites. Even though WordPress now has a performance team and it has made progress, the reality is that it hasn’t really made much progress yet, he said.

WordPress will remain the market leader for a long time, but the decline in market share is seen as a symptom of a deeper problem.

WordPress 6.0

Recently, the company released WordPress 6.0, named “Arturo”, inspired by Grammy-winning jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill. It comes with over 500 improvements and 400 bug fixes. WordPress hopes to make the platform more developer-friendly and provide a rich content creation experience for its end users.

New features in Arturo include an improved writing experience, built-in templates, and block lock controls.

“Extending Gutenberg to a full site-editing experience in WordPress meant that any issues the community had to deal with were complex and far-reaching. WordPress 6.0 is an example of the community’s commitment to tackling these tough challenges together.

“With thoughtful updates to the writing experience, the creation of better block functionality, and the addition of an intuitive new style selector, I’m really proud of the work that has gone into this release. to create a great site editing experience,” mentioned Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Executive Director, WordPress.

For the first time in a decade, Joost De Valk said WordPress was overtaken by innovation. Other CMSs like Squarespace and Wix don’t do anything revolutionary on their own; instead, they simply implement best practices for site speed and SEO.

It’s time to restart

A few years ago, few small or medium businesses sold their products online or had a website to begin with. Over the past few years, and more so since the pandemic, many businesses have gone online and many internet businesses have popped up all over the world. A small internet business may opt for Wix because of site speed and SEO, as they completely depend on their website to generate revenue.

Nick Wilmot, a member of the great WordPress community, said that if WordPress wants to retain its market share or, better yet, grow it, it will have to pull itself together. For me, as a small studio, that means releasing well-thought-out, broadly-featured features that make it easy to build sites that customers find easy to manage, he added.

Similarly, Jon Henshaw, SEO Director at Paramount, said that Wix and Squarespace are easier tools for building a site. As they improve their SEO tools, there are fewer and fewer reasons to switch to WordPress.

Ultimately, WordPress has some issues to deal with.

Esther L. Gunn