I do a fair amount of trash-talking about WordPress these days like all the other hipster "used it before it was cool" web devs with a blog but I'm hoping to add a fresh perspective to the "WordPress is over party". My personal re-evaluation of the platform began when this Covid fiasco dropped and I wondered if I had an ounce of spirit left to push forward through a career where I had no choice but to use WordPress. And I'll give credit where credit's due: There isn't a better blog engine out there; there just isn't. I ran a pretty popular trash-movie blog on it for years. I still use it to post about podcasts and fringe topics that interest me. But I'm drawing a line in the sand here and now: I won't use it as a website platform ever again, if I can help it, and if you're in the decision-maker role at an agency that relies on it for the signature agency production-churn pace, I beg of you:
- Explore your options
- Consider your clients' needs more carefully
- Challenge your developers
There are other articles out there which illustrate the downside of WordPress in much greater detail than I intend to go into here, so I'll let them do the talking, but for my argument's sake I'll give you a quick outline of why it has to go:
Security: As of this writing, wordpress.org boasts that 39% of the web is powered by WordPress. Pretty snazzy! Fifty million WordPress fans can't be wrong, right? But that's kind of the problem. WordPress is so ubiquitous that any jabroni with a few bucks in Bitcoin can buy a sheet of compromised passwords on the Dark Web, or can lease a couple hours from some Ukranian Malware As A Service outfit and bombard a thousand WordPress sites until they find a hole -- and they will find a hole. Ever looked at the logs that your WordPress security plugin provides? You're using a security plugin, right? RIGHT??? They've been knocking on your door and kicking the tires since the moment your site went live; thousands of times a day.
The Maintenance Commitment: One of WordPress's biggest draws is that it's free but if you intend to use it as the cornerstone of your business's marketing strategy, you're going to want to budget for several hundred bucks worth of premium plugins since those require the author to support them. But not only that, you as the site owner have to constantly keep your software updated. Run your backup. Update the software. Update the plugins. Review the entire site to make sure the last update didn't break anything. If you're doing it right, you're doing this several times a month. Maybe even several times a week. It's a hassle.
Performance: A key factor in the war for SEO supremacy is how well your website performs. You can follow all the Moz best practices for content but if your website takes a million years to load or is going to run your mobile visitors' data allotments into the red, Google is going to shunt your site to results pages that haven't seen a human eye in years. You can certainly get your Lighthouse scores in the high 90's but it means a half dozen more plugins for performance enhancements, developers that write smart, minimalist code and a user that is smart about their use of media. The latter two things, particularly when it comes to WordPress sites, are definitely not things you can count on.
WordPress is used by a ton of people, sure, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a piece of clunky, antiquated tech given to bloat and abuse. The web has moved on.
"So what's the alternative?" I hear you say.
Glad you asked.
Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO scores, aside, this site received a 93 performance score from Lighthouse before any performance enhancements were added. What's my secret? I don't rest on my laurels. About a year ago I took a look over Upwork to see what sort of front-end gigs were actually paying well and a couple names kept coming up: Gatsby.js and Next.js. The static site generators? How does that even work in a world driven by on-demand content? How foolish was I?
SSG's are exactly what they sound like. They're JavaScript libraries that output a website structured more like the websites of the olden days of the web: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. That's it. No PHP, no jQuery libraries, no Java, no database requests. The site is generated on the server and a static website is served to the client, completely cut off from the server-side machinery that built it. Nearly all modern website vulnerabilities are eliminated. What's more, these SSGs are built for speed, right out of the box. The libraries are stuffed with code that optimizes your components during the build process far more than just minifying and concatenating it into single files. Take on a functional approach to programming and you'll be unstoppable!
Gatsby and Next aren't the only SSGs out there but they're the two libraries struggling for dominance, with no clear leader, and they're definitely driving React.js's success. I chose Gatsby for purely arbitrary reasons and did some research. After years of tinkering with React but never finding an in to use it on the regular I finally had my excuse to get deeper into it and build a solid understanding. Next I needed to choose a CMS to manage site content. I picked Prismic after reading about a freelancer that built all his sites in Gatsby and used Prismic for a CMS and Shopify for eCommerce. Prismic is part of a wave of next-generation headless content management systems.
Headless? What's that?
I'll explain.
When you use WordPress you're locked in to using WordPress's core software and functionality. To build a site on its back, you have to do it the WordPress way. Same goes for Drupal, Craft, etc. Each one of these options has since made their CMS data available to front ends with an API but at their core they're still monolithic systems intended to be used in the closed environment of their core software. You're also responsible for running the core software on your server. Prismic and the like have no core software and exist out there in the wilds as SaaS platforms that you hook into and do what thou wilt with the data. Your data's security is in their capable hands. Don't be a jabroni about your login credentials and let security concerns fade into the distant memory of Web 2.0.
The additional benefits of using Gatsby is having all of the React tools available to you. Making the leap from a simple website to a modern, progressive web app becomes a matter of reading and comprehending the documentation. Your site now has an app state right out of the box that you can use to do all sorts of magical things with. Install the Redux library or an alternative to supercharge your state and go even further! Spotty budget hosting and expensive dedicated server hosting fades into the rearview as well as you migrate your app to modern cloud computing services like Amazon's AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Netlify. Aren't those expensive, though? God no! Depending on how much computing resources your app is using, you can look forward to annual hosting bills of $20, maybe. I currently have a site running on AWS Amplify that costs $6 a year. Downtime? Outages? What are those?
Not every client is going to be able to swing a progressive web app budget and for that, economy website plans are going to be necessary but even for a client operating on short money, trying to prop up a small business website or whatever, there are still better options than WordPress. Squarespace and Wix get the job done perfectly well with none of the WordPress baggage. They have all the ease of use and familiar controls of the WordPress CMS UI and in many ways their layout and page builder tools are far better and more intuitive than the myriad WordPress page builders and just like the cloud computing giants the only thing standing between you and a compromised website is a strong password and the Squarespace/Wix security protocols.
CEOs, tech leads, project managers, you owe it to your clients and your developers to branch out and get modern. You've built entire production infrastructures around WordPress and now you feel trapped in this endless cycle because introducing the learning curve of a new technology eats into production and staffing up for a new tech stack would be hilarious if the task wasn't so depressing. But the only thing standing between you and gaining the competitive edge of objectively better websites is biting the bullet and making a plan toward progress that minimizes the pain. WordPress is nearly twenty years old. It played its part and at one time it was the king of the internet but there are newer, younger, and better technologies that do everything WordPress did, only better, faster, and more securely.
Developers, embrace the learning curve. One year ago I was looking at the competition I faced and realized that in spite of 20 years of professional web development experience I was struggling to be competitive with people building websites with no formal training, a sixth of the experience I have, the Divi page builder and hourly rates significantly lower than my own. It didn't matter how good or smart my code was, someone was always willing to do it crappier and for far cheaper. Cut WordPress loose from your toolset, earn what you're worth and leave the jabroni competition in the bargain basement.