WordPress Now Powers Over One-Third of the Top 10 Million Sites on the Web (wordpress.org) 61
WordPress now powers over 1/3rd of the top 10 million sites on the web, according to W3Techs. From a blog post: Our market share has been growing steadily over the last few years, going from 29.9% just one year ago to 33.4% now. We are, of course, quite proud of these numbers! The path here has been very exciting. In 2005, we were celebrating 50,000 downloads. Six years later, in January 2011, WordPress was powering 13.1% of websites. And now, early in 2019, we are powering 33.4% of sites. Our latest release has already been downloaded close to 14 million times, and it was only released on the 21st of February.
Re:And it's crap. (Score:4, Insightful)
Still better then what the bosses Nephew who knows HTML can generate.
Re:And it's crap. (Score:4, Interesting)
The main point, is most websites want to be done on the CHEAP. Hiring skilled people to actually make a solid web site, even for just a public bill board, contact list, and open positions page, can cost a lot of money to be done right. Too much for most companies, so they will find a way to do it for cheap. Wordpress has name recognition, and most site can be made to look presentable without those expensive people who know what they are doing.
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The main point, is most websites want to be done on the CHEAP.
Thats the fudamental point lots of people are missing here. Lots of people complaining about IDIOTS, but those "idiots" made the sound decision to go for a cheap website when they were small and spend the savings on growing the business. That's how they're now big enough to pay for the expensive whiners to get them out of a hole.
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But it makes up for it by having LOTS of users! You can't argue with success. The more sites that use Wordpress, the less security vulnerabilities will matter. Because .
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Have they made it work with sqlite yet?
If not, it's dead to me.
Also... that whole blogging and user signup thing. Who needs that sort of baggage for a basic website? It could run a whole lot faster/better without it.
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Itâ(TM)s possible via some hack jobs, but the plugins are all questionable if the will continue to work.
Yep. Unless you can try all possible code paths then you never know how/when it might fail.
I heard they use PDO in wordpress now but that doesn't mean they're not sending MySQL-specific commands.
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That says that "done is better than perfect" and that the technically superior solution doesn't always win out over first-mover-advantage, good marketing, good developer ecosystem. I use Wordpress for a few sites and although I am not a super PHP fan, Wordpress serves me fine.
Removing years from our collective lives (Score:4, Informative)
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One 5-second page load at a time.
My wordpress page loads almost instantly. Of course, I'm not stupid enough to be running 50 plugins.
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I used to use a shared hosting environment (years and years ago). However, I ran into the unspoken rule of Shared Hosting: "Your site/content better not get too popular." The host has thousands of sites on a single server. As long as those thousand sites each gets a tiny amount of traffic (and most do), this is fine. modern servers can handle a thousand "hundred hits a month is a lot" sites with no problem. When one site becomes too popular, though, it starts to drain resources from the other sites and thro
Bold and the brave (Score:2)
How anyone can run Wordpress and sleep at night is beyond my ability to comprehend. Must either be really brave or really really really stupid.
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Actually it only SEEMS like bliss. But the feeling is the same.
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25 years. That's how long I've been a web developer. I know more coding languages than you can name off. I've worked on just about every type of server on the market. I've worked on sites with millions of users everyday. WordPress is just a tool. Like all tools it's dangerous in the wrong hands and sometimes even in the right hands.. Anyone can swing a hammer, but I've seen more than one person (some who knew what they were doing) wack themselves on the thumb. If you're scared to run WordPress because you t
It's amazing. (Score:5, Informative)
I do WordPress development and Consulting for a living. Quite a good living. This piece of software is utterly amazing. Built by people who obviously didn't have the faintest idea about how to build a proper web application it's become the perpetual source of things to fix and work to do.
Absolutely amazing.
Just this week a huge installation running WP and WooCommerce, bloated by idiots who added 40+ plugins to this mission critical (!!) setup finally exploded into the face of my employer who wouldn't listen for over a year I've been warning him.
You can do amazing stuff with WordPress, but only if you know how to work around it's pitfalls and do most of the things not using WordPress utilities or the abysmally broken WP DB model. I will continue to do so because there's simply no end to jobs right now but you need good humor to deal with the daily crazy.
Truly amazing.
Re:It's amazing. (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you read the WordPress code? I have, it's a steaming pile of spaghetti sauced with all the bad practices. For 15 years it's been the poster child for writing PHP badly.
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I personally maintain a PHP code base that is even worse than Wordpress. And yep, that keeps me busy too.
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man,been there, done that!!
i have spend the last few day with the exact same problem, WP, woocommerce, userpro and other 30 plugins... a hunt to find what was the plugin that broke authentication... but doing live and forcing the default theme, as disabling some plugins broke the site, as some idiot decided to edit the main theme to add some code and explodes when some plugins are disabled... and it isn't even my job, but it is better for me to help then than to find 20 wordpress installs, with ancient vers
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Lots of people use Wordpress. Lots of people use Windows. Quantity must imply some kind of goodness. Sort of like how 'death and taxes' are apparently very popular based on the vast number of people they apply to.
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perl is amazing... as long you don't need to change anything! :D
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NO CARRIER
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Most people use three year old Android phones filled with carrier bloatware as well. Just because it's popular, doesn't mean that it's good.
A turd responsible for over 1/3rd... (Score:3)
A turd responsible for over 1/3rd if the top sites... brilliant.
I wanted to make a blog at some point and was told that Wordpress is the most popular thing out there by far, so it would be easy to support, 1-click installed by my host etc. I didn't give it another thought, I mean, how bad could it be?
So it took me a while to realize just how bad and how slow it is exactly. It was clearly developed by people who had no idea about... well anything, really. Mindboggling how it caught on so much.
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The worst software tends to be the most successful...
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The worst software tends to be the most successful...
No, the software that's most successful is the one that makes something simpler for the masses. People seem to think great technology wins. It never does. Solving problems wins.
Hint: We could learn from our own evolution. The changes that make you more likely to reproduce are what win. Not necessarily things we think should win (intelligence for example). In fact, stupid people are far more likely to have a baby than smart ones.
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Try one of the static site generators, like Hugo.
Soooo much nicer. It works the way you expect as a real coder too: you write your stuff, compile it, debug, then upload.
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Easy, greedy people who know nothing about programming and see the internet as one giant get rich quick scheme. Hire the cheapest programmers they can find and quite often try to cheat them and run the cheapest software and hardware they can and voila, a cheap nasty wordpress internet. Greed and ignorance made it happen and of course wordpress sites tend to disappear as rapidly as they appear, it is spreading globally though and hence, for the time being makes up losses. Probably using wordpress would be a
Try Banshee (Score:2)
Drupal went enterprise, left WP the market... (Score:2)
The leadership of Drupal - Wordpress's only real competition a decade ago - decided to grow up and cater to real programmers and the corporate/enterprise clients of Acquia (the Drupal creator's company). His decision to go all-in with OOP left average Drupal users - web "coders" that are not classically trained and didn't need or want the higher level of difficulty (and development costs) just to get the same results in their use case - hanging in the wind.
That has left upwards of a million legacy Drupal 6
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OOP isn't what bothers me about Drupal, it's that it still has the same old problem that installing a module can completely break your install to the point that you have to go in manually and not just remove the module, but also tell Drupal that you've done it before you can use it again. There has to be SOME way to avoid that! I'm not talking about obscure modules, either, but stuff with many many installs. My D7 to D8 migration attempt resulted in a site that doesn't show body copy. WTF?
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OOP isn't what bothers me about Drupal, it's that it still has the same old problem that installing a module can completely break your install to the point that you have to go in manually and not just remove the module, but also tell Drupal that you've done it before you can use it again.
I can't speak to D8, but those hard, WSOD PHP fails do happen in D7 on occasion because some contrib modules just aren't written well (no try/catch backstops in them, etc.), and they're not well tested anymore because of
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On the D7 -> D8 migrations, more often than not the D7 site has JUST enough customization/hacking done outside the "Drupal way" of doing things to go from a 100% successful migration to a 98% correct in the DB but be a complete, "WTF, Where's my content?", mess that can require an in-depth understanding of D8 to debug.
My website customization is done literally 100% the Drupal way. My theme is customized only for cosmetics. Everything else was done in views, etc. Yet the migration still resulted in a site that did not show body copy. I'm deeply disappointed, and probably will just go to Backdrop. There's some time between now and the deadline, though, so maybe they'll get migrate working correctly. I'm not going to hold my breath, though.
BTW - Try Backdrop CMS before Wordpress (Score:3)
The sad part for the slowly rotting community of mostly non-OOP Drupal experts/coders/architects is that Backdrop CMS [backdropcms.org] - a fork of Drupal 7 from around 5-6 years ago - was the right path forward for them. The fork's creators have simplified Drupal back to where it was when it was gaining in popularity (Drupal 5-6 era) and was simpler to work with, all while continuing to add new features and keep its core strengths that made it a better CMS tool to use than Wordpress for all but the simplest of blog sites.
Backdrop CMS was supposed to take Drupal's old place in the small-to-medium website market, while the current OOP-based Drupal v8+ moved onto enterprise-level clients. That hasn't happened, however, because it gets zero marketing from the remaining stalwards in the Drupal community that have become too invested in the Drupal brand to see the writing on the wall:
(1) OOP-based Drupal (v8+) will never be accepted as a real option for small-to-medium websites when WordPress is cheaper and faster in most cases.
(2) Despite its change to OOP, Drupal 8+ talent is still too hard to find to warrant an enterprise-level investment - espeically when other more well-known framework options (with big money behind them) are out there.
(3) Unless you work for Acquia or have some other enterprise-level client(s) with already deep Drupal roots, the Drupal job market is winding down fast - and when everyone's transitioned out of Drupal 5-7, it's over. Adapt or die.
Backdrop will hopefully not serve as another reminder that the winners in free markets are usually the products with the best marketing and lowest total cost of ownership (the "good enough" choice) - not the one with the best reliability, build quality, or number of features.
Wordpress is a mess, but... (Score:2)
Wordpress is a mess, but there are a few plugins that can drastically reduce the attack surface and the likelihood of an attacker making any headway.
I'd recommend Wordfence and Block Bad Queries, to name just a couple. I wouldn't run a WP site without at least these two plugins, period. There are also some decent guides to hardening a WP site and they're well worth the time to look at.
And to address the inevitable screaming that will occur regarding WP and its mess of spaghetti code, I agree 100% that you s