What are some of the most annoying things you find in WP? (Both WP and Niche-specific)
What are some of the most annoying things you find in WP? (Both WP and Niche-specific)
As a developer, I’m always curious to find pain-points of WordPress users. I am looking for specific problems you face, be it niche-specific or general about WP.
Probably not the kind of information you’re looking for but yearly subscriptions for pretty much everything. I know it’s never going away but man do I hate them.
When I find a feature-packed theme that has everything that I need that will save me a lot of time and I buy it and I find the absolute most disgusting piece of code that exists on Earth that makes extending it a longer task than making it from scratch
#1 Complaint: How badly many plug-ins degrade site performance due to excess Javascript and CSS, even on pages where they are not needed/used.
#2 Subscriptions for EVERYTHING. Of course, I always prefer free, but would do one-time purchases when it seemed worthwhile. Now if there’s a subscription, and there usually is, I will look for alternatives.
#3 Related to #2, yearly automatic rebilling and refusing to refund excess months of use if I want to cancel. Peepso, I’m looking at you and your terrible customer service, refusing to give a prorated refund a month into my second yearly subscription after Google’s algorithm killed my site and I had to stop using your bloated plug-in to fix my Core Web Vitals.
#4 My backend sidebar menu being 2 miles long due to every plug-in adding its own huge section. Having to scroll and search for the section I need. WordPress needs more premade sections and should require plug-in devs to put them under a standard section instead of all at top level.
Gutenberg. I still don’t have anything nice to say about it. Glad the classic editor is still an option.
Garbage automatization process. You can’t efficiently build automated tasks, you basically have to write wp-cli commands that you set to run with cron. No queues, no jobs, no nothing, just a lame wp-cron that rely on traffic to work. Unbelievable in 2023.
I just found out that many slider plugins use the default media library to add images. This library let you not make subfolders, so the slider plugins dump all the images in the one folder ‘uploads’.
Very annoying.
You can make subfolders with other plugins but this does not solve the problem.
WordPress should fix this shortcoming with its media manager.
I know this is stupid but I was just thinking about how much it bugged me and then I saw this post….
How the call the garbage the “bin” instead of “garbage” or “trash”.
A real pain point, is the so so many Customizers or Page builders that are used where if you build it using one page builder you cannot recreate your site using a different page builder. Themes like Generate Press, Kadence, Colibri, Elemontor and the hundred different Elementor plugins, there is no way to migrate your site from one theme to the other.
I know it would be a Herculean task to try and have a conversion plugin because you will need to map out each “block type” to its corresponding block type and to make things worst. There might not be an equivalent for a specific block where one theme has it and the other doesn’t.
I don’t even know if it is possible to even build something of that nature.
But I have met so many people over the years that like to try out different themes or find out the hard way that a specific theme does not support a certain plugin they desperately need to use and they have to start over from scratch.
Over the years the remove_action/filter has been a pain when people use OOP but don’t provide some type of service locator. Lot’s of available solutions, I tend to roll with PHP-DI currently, but have used the Symfony DI package as well as hand rolled a few solutions to it. The “how” doesn’t really matter, but for the love of christ provide some way access the instance that an action/filter is attached to.
It’s more of a gripe with irresponsible developers than with WP itself though, as most of my gripes are. Also developers who don’t provide actions/filters, you are the worst.
Probably not the kind of information you’re looking for but yearly subscriptions for pretty much everything. I know it’s never going away but man do I hate them.
When I find a feature-packed theme that has everything that I need that will save me a lot of time and I buy it and I find the absolute most disgusting piece of code that exists on Earth that makes extending it a longer task than making it from scratch
#1 Complaint: How badly many plug-ins degrade site performance due to excess Javascript and CSS, even on pages where they are not needed/used.
#2 Subscriptions for EVERYTHING. Of course, I always prefer free, but would do one-time purchases when it seemed worthwhile. Now if there’s a subscription, and there usually is, I will look for alternatives.
#3 Related to #2, yearly automatic rebilling and refusing to refund excess months of use if I want to cancel. Peepso, I’m looking at you and your terrible customer service, refusing to give a prorated refund a month into my second yearly subscription after Google’s algorithm killed my site and I had to stop using your bloated plug-in to fix my Core Web Vitals.
#4 My backend sidebar menu being 2 miles long due to every plug-in adding its own huge section. Having to scroll and search for the section I need. WordPress needs more premade sections and should require plug-in devs to put them under a standard section instead of all at top level.
Gutenberg. I still don’t have anything nice to say about it. Glad the classic editor is still an option.
Garbage automatization process. You can’t efficiently build automated tasks, you basically have to write wp-cli commands that you set to run with cron. No queues, no jobs, no nothing, just a lame wp-cron that rely on traffic to work. Unbelievable in 2023.
I just found out that many slider plugins use the default media library to add images. This library let you not make subfolders, so the slider plugins dump all the images in the one folder ‘uploads’.
Very annoying.
You can make subfolders with other plugins but this does not solve the problem.
WordPress should fix this shortcoming with its media manager.
I know this is stupid but I was just thinking about how much it bugged me and then I saw this post….
How the call the garbage the “bin” instead of “garbage” or “trash”.
A real pain point, is the so so many Customizers or Page builders that are used where if you build it using one page builder you cannot recreate your site using a different page builder. Themes like Generate Press, Kadence, Colibri, Elemontor and the hundred different Elementor plugins, there is no way to migrate your site from one theme to the other.
I know it would be a Herculean task to try and have a conversion plugin because you will need to map out each “block type” to its corresponding block type and to make things worst. There might not be an equivalent for a specific block where one theme has it and the other doesn’t.
I don’t even know if it is possible to even build something of that nature.
But I have met so many people over the years that like to try out different themes or find out the hard way that a specific theme does not support a certain plugin they desperately need to use and they have to start over from scratch.
Over the years the remove_action/filter has been a pain when people use OOP but don’t provide some type of service locator. Lot’s of available solutions, I tend to roll with PHP-DI currently, but have used the Symfony DI package as well as hand rolled a few solutions to it. The “how” doesn’t really matter, but for the love of christ provide some way access the instance that an action/filter is attached to.
It’s more of a gripe with irresponsible developers than with WP itself though, as most of my gripes are. Also developers who don’t provide actions/filters, you are the worst.