WordPress market share shrinking for first time in 18 years
As a hosting partner we too have become closely associated with WordPress over the years, what the customer asks for is of course important to support. WordPress is the choice for most businesses and individuals because it is easy to use. Content can simply be written in a visual way, and the wide range of both free and paid themes means that the layout of a website can be arranged at the touch of a button. Like any market, once in a while things change. In this blog post, let's look at why WordPress is having a dip for the first time, and what are the underlying causes of this.
WordPress as a Content Management System
WordPress has achieved its position by supporting and making it suitable for many different websites and underlying operating systems. As long as PHP is supported and MySQL can run WordPress, with its exceptions of course. Furthermore, it can be expanded until you drop by many different plug-ins and themes, most of which can be downloaded for free. With complete webshops that can be set up with WooCommerce to a nice slider on the homepage for your products. Everything can be pasted with a plug-in or theme to shape your website according to your wishes. This has its disadvantages and advantages.
What WordPress has been working on in the last couple of years is making themes completely visually editable, and a new editor made for working with blocks. The implementation of this has been anything but quick, however, and has been accompanied by a number of problems that have surfaced. Other players who will be discussed further below have managed to realize this faster since their inception.
Each Content Management System is associated with its necessary updates and other regular activities, only with websites completely under your own control you will have sooner trouble with this or notice something. You have to install every update yourself and make sure that one of your plug-ins does not spoil the fun. That's why you see many Managed WordPress hosting packages appearing, also with us of course. We take care of all the technical work and make sure your WordPress website stays secure and online.
Other players that have entered the market
Over the years a lot of Content Management Systems have been added and have been forgotten. WordPress as one of the strongest players on the market has only seen an upward trend in its users in the past. WordPress is free, self-hosted and easy to use. The only thing that needs to be paid for is the hosting package, and the domain name itself. Thus, anyone can achieve this for less than a week of shopping. With a Total SSD 25 package and .nl domain name you will spend 42 euros ex VAT on an annual basis. For almost every budget this will therefore be accessible to set up their own website.
Other players have focused on the webshop market, such as Shopify, or on making websites even easier than with WordPress. SquareSpace and Wix are prominent examples of this. Here you have the opportunity to set up the entire website with blocks and get going visually. The familiar drag and drop but with elements that you yourself do not see any code or configuration file. Creating a website is no longer a task. And the process is so streamlined that any starter can pick it up. The downside of such systems is that you are stuck with them, you don't have the same freedom in this as you would with a WordPress website. Where you can go worldwide with almost any hosting party. For streamlining and website builder, of course, they also charge more for the cost.
So Shopify, SquareSpace and Wix are making the market share of WordPress smaller. Partly thanks to the many advertisements they do on channels such as YouTube, other social media and the Google search network, they are trying to expand their target group. WordPress itself is currently still intertwined with a certain theme choice or many plug-ins to get the same thing done as SquareSpace or Wix. A complete sitebuilder can be achieved in WordPress through plug-ins like Elementor or Divi, but these plug-ins make for heavy websites. These plugins also require additional plug-ins in order to work optimally. That is why we often recommend to choose another option, and already pick a ready-made theme that you already like. And for the real sitebuilder experience still wait until WordPress releases it completely.
Investing in speed and Google Pages scores
Speed and usability of a website go hand in hand and are essential, not only for your scores in the various search engines. But also for the users. In recent years, speed has increasingly become an item on which the focus is placed. And with good reason too. We do everything to keep our servers as fast as possible and to provide the best possible service for websites on the Dutch, Belgian and German markets. With our data centers in Amsterdam and Utrecht, we are at the forefront of the European market and the major Internet hubs.
Sitebuilders such as SquareSpace and Wix have ensured in recent years that in addition to their simple setup of websites, it is also made easy to keep the website fast. They can do this partly because only they have the code in hand. And so can be ahead of a lot of problems that WordPress doesn't get rid of as easily. Because of the structure of the WordPress core and its many plug-ins, themes and more from third parties, this is not as manageable as when you control it yourself.
WordPress did create a team for this, but with the implementation of the new sitebuilder now available in beta, that will be the focus before speed can be seriously addressed.
What do you think? Are these the first signs that WordPress is being knocked off its throne? Or will the release of the latest updates of WordPress actually start an upward trend again? As a hosting provider, we are of course excited to see what the developments will be. And of course we will keep you informed in our blog posts and news. Let us know your opinion via Social Media.
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