I know a lot of people hate on WordPress and that’s not what i’m trying to do at all. I think WordPress is an amazing blogging site and people have done some really awesome things with it. It obviously is effective for a lot of people because it’s still extremely popular. I want to know exactly why. Maybe I’m biased as a developer who hasn’t been on the business side much and is probably putting more weight on developer experience than most agency’s will.
I’m coming from a paradigm as somebody who started developing with the MERN stack, nodejs, Nextjs, etc… I know a lot of devs and agencies have been using WordPress for a lot of years. However I still don’t understand why when there’s seemingly better solutions out there.
After graduating bootcamp I applied for a bunch of jobs and ended up landing a WordPress job. I did other things too like landing pages with bootstrap and jquery. Email campaigns and automated stuff, but I was mainly using and frankly hacking WordPress builders. The two builders my agency used were Avada and Oxygen. I liked oxygen better but i still found its limitations frustrating. The only WordPress builder I used that I liked was Bricks.
Not to mention the plugin ecosystem being really messy. Pre-styled plugins that are annoying to fit into a site, plugin conflicts, massive caching problems, etc… we’re all part of my experience with WordPress.
I mainly develop with Nextjs without a builder now. I do understand the need for a builder however for agency’s that are pumping out massive amounts of sites with not a ton of staff. That said all of the options I’ve mentioned above have really nice visual builders, free tiers that most business to business and some marketing websites can probably get away with that deploy on Vercel within in seconds, components are reusable and recyclable in all of these CMS’s and builders, you get a visual builder that’s more modern and customizable in my experience, and they all have easy client side editing. Plus they’re extendable with npm packages and integrate into frameworks like React, Remix, Next, etc…
I really am genuinely curious about people’s opinions. I know WordPress is a popular headless CMS for Next but i don’t even get that to be honest when there’s CMS’s that take way less configuration and are more intuitive to the platforms. just want to ask why use WordPress over one of these potentially cheaper, especially starting out, more easily extendable, and more scalable options?
This is one thing hardcore devs don’t get.
Maintainability beyond them and their ego.
I can shake a tree and three wordpress devs will fall out. CraftCMS not so much. Plus it’s plain annoying to work on Craft. WordPress is way better. Point is, it’s hard to find someone to work on a craft site if Bob quits or gets fired.
Custom coded sites? I gotta get someone up to speed and then pay for that learning. Then their own ego gets in the way of how to do it the right way (aka their ego driven way)
For me it’s simple. I don’t use headless WordPress. I feel like when you’re going headless you’re creating something big enough that you want to choose tools that are better suited for particular job.
WordPress is simple the best for me when you want to create fast and reliable solution, and keeping it low-budget for clients that want to validate idea or just don’t need anything special.
WordPress does its job just as good as others and you don’t need Vercel or VM to host it. And it’s something that clients are often times used to use. As people are lazy it plays a big part to.
“I think WordPress is an amazing blogging site”
Might as well add that ‘all wordpress sites get hacked’.
Jeeessshhh!
Because as an agency owner, focusing on Next is like deciding you want to eat a sprinkle when the rest of the doughnut is still on the table
Larger client audience, cheaper dev hiring, super broad industry application – there are disadvantages to building in WP, but that’s why many agencies start there and the build out their specialisation tech stack later, with WP as the safety net
This is before we factor in the most important part – the client doesn’t care. For sub £100k projects they’ll literally just worry about whether they can use the CMS (and spoiler alert, every company has someone who’s used WordPress before), and for post £100k projects you’re looking at Sitecore, AE, Kontent; which can have fucking dreadful editor experiences.
Because CMS’s and devtools come and go all the time, yet WordPress is still here after 20+ years. You don’t want to build something for a client on a platform that’s going to go under a few years later.
A lot of people are dismissing “Wordpress is an amazing blogging platform.” But the hard truth is that *after the site is launched,* 99% of the work is blogging (or blogging equivalents like adding and editing events, products, portfolios, testimonials, team updates, etc.”
I remember an old dev saying a site is only 10-20% complete on the day it’s launched. If you’re a professional programmer then both your job and your responsibility ends at launch then it makes sense to flirt with all kinds of hard code solutions.
As much as the core Gutenberg project wishes it were otherwise, the whole point of WordPress is that ordinary site owners *don’t* have to hire a full-stack programmer to add or edit a blog post.
There are hundreds of millions of experienced WordPress users worldwide. Once a site is setup it’s roughly as easy to learn and use as Gmail. And while Gutenberg makes *operating* WordPress harder than Gmail it still takes beginners less than a week to figure out how to perform the tasks that make up 90% of post-launch use.
WordPress helps make the website go-live so much faster because of the wide variety of plugins / extensions available.
When building websites, I don’t have to reinvent the wheel – I can use plugins which help maximize my $ per hour earned.
We’ve got extremely similar backgrounds. I’m self taught and just got my first dev job at an agency mostly using WordPress, whereas I was mostly training on the MERN stack beforehand.
From what I’ve gathered, agencies are very different. Does yours only use page builders? At mine, we don’t touch them. EVERY single page we build is a custom theme. Which is still 90% code, it just uses a lot of “native” (pre-built) functions. You still have almost 100% control over a WordPress site using code. Like. you said, page builders can be very restrictive. And it’s still VERY fast coding a WordPress site with code, even versus page builders. I easily pump out several landing pages a week.
After having built several dynamic full-stack projects for my portfolio from scratch using MERN before working here, it’s easy to appreciate how much better a CMS is from a business and security perspective when mostly building frontend sites. With WordPress, you can make a headline or some body content dynamic in like 30 seconds and a little code (get_field), whereas it would easily take hours to build out the database and backend for each site with MERN/Next then still at least 30 minutes maybe for each little section of text and or images. That just doesn’t make sense unless you’re building enterprise software, a SaaS, etc.
I work at a bigish agency that built a major government site that you have heard about in WordPress. We now build primarily in Drupal but, frankly, we’ll build in whatever the client wants.
We have clients come to us with WP sites that they want to transition to a new platform. We have clients that love their WP sites and just want support. Same for Drupal and other CMSes out there.
The consistent thread here is “what the client wants or will agree to.”
The client $ come with conditions, always. And they are risk averse, want to minimize their staff hiring/development, etc.
If you like a roof over your head and eating, you’ll take that into account.
So here’s the thing. I usually build custom sites with WordPress, ACF Blocks and Gutenberg. Most code is very easy to maintain and there’s minimal plug-in usage. Building the fields and everything is pretty straightforward and simple enough to maintain.
I started a project on Next and Sanity because this agency I worked with wanted to use it. It was a very slow process. Compiling became very slow as soon as I put Sanity in it. For some reason it’d rerun compilation for everything just for css changes. It became really tiresome, annoying, creating the fields was super slow and querying them wasn’t straightforward. Not to say it’s bad, but it wasn’t “the best” as you claim it to be.
I figured oh great, I will be able to compile it as a static site and won’t need a server. The whole selling point for serverless sites… nope. You are actually running a node server when you deploy these sites because of Sanity. Vercel is actually running these processes for you, so you don’t notice, but it’s not as perfect as they tell you and will charge you high prices if you get DDoS’d (just look at the horror stories on Twitter).
I don’t love WordPress, but I see its benefit. I’d rather have a compiled down static generated site, but we still need to run a database somewhere, so it’s still the same issue regardless.
coooool
In the end, you weren’t dev ….. builder at best.
I develop custom plugins, my companies website is wordpress with custom theme, custom plugins.
I also develop actual apps, some you may / may not know.
Long story short …. wordpress is a custom, add some e-commerce for licensing, invoicing, recurring invoicing ad your agency website can be amazing.
>MERN stack, nodejs, Nextjs, etc… I know a lot of devs and agencies have been using WordPress for a lot of years.
There is absolutely no reason to complicate your life like that. If White House, NASA have WordPress websites that work like normal WordPress (they do), you can also use a WordPress without jumping through hoops like that.
>However I still don’t understand why when there’s seemingly better solutions out there.
If they were better, WH, NASA, CNN et al would be on those stacks. Not WP. Most of those stats exist because of “programmers’ trappings”, not actual business or real-world requirements. And none of them are ‘better’: “Better” is what is reliable, easy, has support, doesnt require you to rehash your entire app due to frequent backwards-incompatible updates and, mostim portantly, is here to stay.
It is widely adapted. Most clients know how to use it. Lots of plugins.
WordPress is like McDonald’s restaurants.
McDonald’s isn’t the best food that money can buy but they’re readily available, cheap, and you always know what to expect.
Managers and marketers love WordPress because it’s easy to find replacement developers, is standardized enough that new developers get up to speed quickly, and has a simple enough interface that non-developers can interact with it in a pinch.
It’s not a platform for developers that want to hone their craft by making “artisanal” websites from scratch. It will never be superior to the best sites made from scratch. But it’s often “good enough” and in an industrial where time is money, that’s usually fine.
I love building sites from scratch, but the reality is that’s not commercially viable in most cases these days. It’s a case of using the right tool for the job.
It’s proven. It’s open source. And it has a MASSIVE developer base.
A developer base that have developed some of the most popular platforms for ecommerce, lms, bookings and more. As a web dev, beyond those main plugins mentioned, it’s so easy to work with, there’s no need to use the kinds of plugins you mentioned that add bloat and styling etc.
Remember, any of the platforms that are not open source could simply cease to exist at any time and kill your entire business at the same time.
The foundation of a WordPress site means that very little training is required to maintain the site. We can build for the client and they can take over.
As long as they can add and remove content they’re very happy. Clients only have to reach out if someone gets borked.