January 2nd, 2025 Posted in Business, Web Design, Web Development, WooCommerce, WordPress

Is WordPress still a good option for 2025?

There’s been all kinds of drama in the WordPress industry over the last few months. Other sites go into it in more detail than here, but basically it’s about two very profitable companies tussling over increasing their already huge profits. As of Dec 24 they are still fighting in court. Web designers, businesses and anyone else who uses WordPress has been at risk of being affected by this nonsense.

The ‘Gutenberg’ Editor

Back in the day WordPress (WP) used to be a blog system, which us developers started turning into small business websites with varying levels of success. As a blog focused app, WP has one main ‘post’ type as well as the ‘pages’. This used a simple editor (Now called the ‘Classic’ editor) that gives one content area to edit with a toobar to add headings, lists, images etc.

The rise of responsive web design (that changes format to suit various screen sizes) meant that having one content area didn’t work very well. We often ended up adding HTML code to the editor, which was confusing and clunky.

To address this, Automattic decided to force the Gutenberg editor on us. This started off very badly due to its confusing interface that broke all the usual WP interface conventions. The plugin to disable Gutenberg currently has over 10 million installs, showing that lots of people don’t want Gutenberg.

Themes & Page Builders

To address the limitations of the blog focused format of WP and Classic editor that Gutenberg aimed to fix, various other themes and page builders have popped up that try to offer a more flexible way of creating visually appealing pages. Unfortunately there are a number of key problems with this;

1. They all use their own user interface conventions, making WP admin even more confusing.
2. Hundreds of settings that may or may not overlap with stock WP settings and trying to be everything to everyone means they are often overwhelming.
3. They aren’t easy to use due to the needs of responsive web design – often a setting like spacing or font size has to be entered in three places to suit mobiles, tablets and computers. This pretty much defeats the object of having CSS – Cascading Style Sheets, an elegant way to define web styles.
4. They make it really easy to make a mess of a site both visually and performance wise.
5. The most popular themes don’t actually do anything aside from promote paid ‘Pro’ versions, as most of the layout and styling will be overridden by the page builder anyway.
6. The line between themes and plugins often blurs, confusing matters further.

So now we’ve got a blog based system with two potential editors included (Classic and Gutenberg), plus the ‘customiser’. Now add a theme and a page builder plus a bunch of other plugins and things start to become extremely confusing.

There’s also a fundamental issue here that has created severe restrictions. To get your theme added to the official repository, it has to allow people to switch themes without losing any content. This is almost impossible to do without using one of the convoluted page builders or creating a soup of tags or shortcodes in the main content area. If that isn’t required, we can create clean themes with easy to manage fieldsets that make sense logically and to end users. How often would users want to change the theme when it doesn’t really do anything any more anyway?

Add to this that themes should not officially include any functionality like sliders, social boxes etc and we end up with a horrible mishmash of a theme that doesn’t really do much, a page builder that uses its own interface and includes tons of unused code, then all functionality added by plugins from various other developers.

Misc Technical Issues

Speed: Even without all this junk installed, WordPress is extremely slow compared to other content management systems and especially so if WooCommerce is added. While Opencart has its own issues, it’s blazing fast compared to WooCommerce which shows that it’s entirely possible to have a fast ecommerce site.

Content structure: Other systems like Craft or Expression Engine allow for as many ‘channels’ like the WordPress blog posts as you want. They also make it easy to add custom fields to a template that makes editing your content clean and simple.

What I’d like to see is WordPress core support custom post types and custom fields out of the box – basically everything Advanced Custom Fields Pro does. Make Gutenberg an optional plugin and focus on making core WP as fast as possible. The speed of ClassicPress proves that WordPress admin is bloated and slow because of all the legacy junk Automattic still include years after most of us stopped needing it.

Issues with Automattic & WordPress

Uncertainty: The ongoing legal drama largely was caused by one person’s crazy behaviour. It’s now causing ripples in the WP community with many people leaving Automattic or stopping developing on the plugin/theme repository. Corporations tussling like this has real life effects for huge amounts of small businesses that work with WordPress or rely on it to run their websites. Most of my web design projects use WordPress and Advanced Custom Fields so it feels precarious at the moment.

Exploitation: Automattic is the parent company of WordPress, and sell many related products. Confusingly WordPress is available as a hosted freemium service at WordPress.com, and a self hosted downloadable version at WordPress.org. There is a lot of overlap between the two with many theme and plugin companies supporting both versions.

Automattic also sell hosting, plugins (like the horrible Jetpack) and are increasingly trying to monetise the WooCommerce ecosystem by spamming upsells all over the dashboard. This profitable ecosystem is all based on the WordPress software and associated plugins, which are developed largely by unpaid volunteers.

Automattic trumpet about being all open source and super matey, but are actually a cutthroat company focused on making a fortune based on the labour of others.

Issues with the Ecosystem

The ecosystem of plugins and themes for self hosted WordPress has become an absolute bin fire.

• Third party growth oriented companies like Yoast, Awesome Motive and WPEngine are monetising basic functionality and aggressively ‘growth hacking’ before taking venture capital or selling out to bigger companies that just want to make money. We can’t rely on this constant buy & sell and subsequent enshittification.
• Notification spam from theme/plugin authors is unbelievable – messages that won’t go away, that sneakily only show a few but then batter you with more every time you click something, notifications that are just upsells, etc.
• Plugin authors selling out to larger companies/hosting providers who then start gouging – I’m expecting Advanced Custom Fields to walk back their ‘lifetime’ Pro license at any point now it’s owned by WPEngine.
• Monopolisation related to all of the above

There’s a business dilemma here. WordPress is open source with loads of free stuff, but developers often abandon their plugins etc due to the support demands of users who often have unrealistic demands and basic knowledge of coding and development. Why would the authors spend their time giving out free support? This makes the ecosystem fragile as they often burn out and abandon their work or sell out to greedy companies. I’d like to see less capitalist growth monopolies and smaller, stable companies charging reasonable prices for their work.

So, What Can We Do?

Plugins: Support independent, less annoying developers like SEOPress, Plausible analytics etc by buying their software. We can’t really expect free(mium) software to be reliable long term without supporting the developers. Use well supported free plugins and contribute money or code fixes where we can.

Themes: Make our own themes or use free ones, use lightweight page builders.

Sell the right solution: Focus on reducing costs for ourselves and our clients.  Use things that aren’t WordPress – fore example ClassicPress works well for simple sites. If a content management system isn’t really needed then HTML sites or static site generators are actually fine for a lot of small businesses.