A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.
Productive Conversations
Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:
- Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
- Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay
WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce, and helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.
Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival, so any talk about WordPress hitting a plateau might sound frightening. However, acknowledging facts is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress, and their goal was to bring the community into the conversation.
The live webinar featured:
- Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
- Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
- Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
- Noel Tock, Owner and Chief Growth Officer at HumanMade
Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community, moderated the discussion.
Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic
The webinar, "Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?" was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.
Yet something that came up is that there are some areas where WordPress is doing exceptionally well, so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind; it’s actually a feature.
At the 17:07 minute mark:
“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “
The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”
Joost de Valk at the 18:09 minute mark:
“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”
That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, particularly with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year-over-year growth rate, providing a reason for optimism in the ecommerce sector.
At the 31:45 minute mark:
“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”
WordPress Market Share Stagnation
The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards; it is simply stuck. The main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.
Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year-over-year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month-over-month period, the market share dropped by -0.28%.
Celebrating the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine ignores that a large percentage of new businesses and websites are increasingly opting for other platforms, with other platforms experiencing higher growth rates.
Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year-over-year (YoY) growth.
CMS YoY Growth
- Webflow: 25.00%
- Shopify: 15.61%
- Wix: 10.71%
- Squarespace: 9.04%
- Duda: 8.89%
- WordPress: 1.85%
Why Stagnation Is A Problem
An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer new businesses are opting for WordPress, these clients will not be looking for themes, plugins, development, or SEO services.
At the 4:18 minute mark, Joost de Valk noted:
“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”
Perception Of Innovation
One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation. There’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform optimized for the fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.
At the 16:51 minute mark:
“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”
Another participant agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible. If users find a gap, a developer can step in and create a plugin to make WordPress whatever users and developers want it to be.
“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plugin for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”
Is Improved Marketing A Solution
One of the things identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems, but it was noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting while WordPress isn’t proactively doing the same. If WordPress isn’t putting out a positive marketing message, the only impression consumers might get is from news about vulnerabilities.
At the 16:21 minute mark:
“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”
This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark, where it was acknowledged that growth was driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.
“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”
Future Of WordPress
This webinar is important because it features the voices of people actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, and accessibility, to security, and plugin development. These insiders have a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.
The fact that they’re discussing the stagnation of WordPress should concern everybody, and their efforts to talk about solutions show that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting these challenges, which reflects a thriving ecosystem.
Watch the webinar:
Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
