I didn’t leave WordPress, WordPress left me

Tuesday, 5 November 2024, 6:31 pm
Article: Bill Bennett

WordPress was great until about a decade ago.

It was open source, which meant it could be free. It was simple and straightforward to use. It was customisable to the point where even non-technical users could build websites that didn’t look like WordPress sites.

WordPress’s stated philosophy was about democratising online publishing. Anyone could do it. You didn’t need skills or deep pockets. You could fire it up, get online and blog.

Unwelcome change

Then around a decade ago, the team behind WordPress began tinkering with it. It became bloated and complicated. It did what software companies often do: It added features that many users neither asked for or wanted.

This meant WordPress sites became cumbersome. There were ways of taming this process, but only up to a point.

WordPress site owners found they were being penalised by Google in search listings as their sites became slower. This was a warning of what was to come.

Gutenberg

Gutenberg was the first clear sign that WordPress was heading in the wrong direction.

For years WordPress was the best way to build a blog or a basic editorial web site.

It was straightforward. Although it needed some technical know-how, early WordPress was accessible. There was a great community of users willing to share information and help newcomers. Online tutorials, user meetups and WordCamps filled in the gaps.

For a while it felt as if Wordpress really was democratising publishing.

The beauty of simplicity

You didn’t need programming skills to dig into early WordPress. But if you wanted to do more than the basics, there were easy-to-install plug-ins to add functionality.

Likewise there were many themes that let you change the look and feel of your site. Even non-developers could take things further by digging in to the CSS or tweaking lines of PHP code.

This simplicity meant it was easy to get information in and out of WordPress. In particular, I could take a blog post, find the underlying HTML code, then cut and paste it into another CMS for instant syndication.

Before and after Gutenberg

Gutenberg changed everything. Before Gutenberg you would write posts in an editor that resembled a text editor like IA Writer. Gutenberg replaced this with an editor that treats every element, text, images and so on, as a block.

Some people, maybe many people, find this approach more useful. It certainly works well for building more sophisticated sites, but this comes at the cost of making WordPress more complex.

It is harder to learn Gutenberg than the TinyMCE editor it replaces.

Page design

If pre-Gutenberg WordPress was like using a text editor, the current edition is more like Adobe’s InDesign. You need to take a training course to learn InDesign; mastery takes years.

Before Gutenberg, WordPress focused on creating great blog posts. Writers could concentrate on words and finding pictures to tell better stories.

Gutenberg is more concerned with layout, how things look on a web page. This can be distracting. It is an invitation to prevarication. There’s a risk it gets in the way of productivity. It certainly gets in the way of writing editorial.

Gutenberg’s gifts

Gutenberg is great for professional website builders. It gives them flexibility.

That extra layer of complexity that leaves casual WordPress users bewildered or in the cold means they can do more. It gives them ways to charge more and it creates a usability barrier which is, in itself, a commercial opportunity.

Professionals can use Gutenberg to design bigger, better sites with more features and functionality. They can also sell custom blocks.

At the time it looked as if Wordpress was pushing Gutenberg in order to compete with companies like Wix and Squarespace which were proprietary alternatives for companies building commercially focused websites.

The newcomers were eating WordPress’s in these key markets.

While the change may have made commercial sense, it sent WordPress further away from its roots as, essentially a blogging or editorial content management system.

It was no longer about publishing.

WordPress.com

About the same time WordPress.com, the commercial, hosted version of the software found more and more ways of charging users. Running a WordPress.com site went from pocket money pricing to we-could-take-the-entire-family-out-for-dinner pricing. To be fair this would depend on which options you chose to buy.

WordPress also dragged out the huge, sprawling Jetpack plug-in which was a way of getting people with open source, self-hosted Wordpress sites to pay subscriptions. A handful of important features were wrapped into Jetpack making the subscription essentially compulsory for any but the most casual, disengaged user.

This was the second sign that Wordpress was no longer the idealist democratic publishing service it once was. It was clear it was out to maximise income.

It’s hard to complain about that. We live in a commercial world. But we don’t have to like it or accept it.

I didn't sign up for a full CMS

I didn’t want an all-singing, all-dancing content management system. For a few years I tinkered with WordPress themes and plug-ins that stripped the complexity, bloat and sluggishness from the software. Until I realised this was a losing battle.

My first website was a hand-coded, flat affair written in HTML and CSS with no database. I considered returning to this, although with 1500 posts that was a daunting prospect.

Since then I settled for Ghost and Micro.blog. The two options offer different approaches, different features. Ghost is clearly aimed at journalists, bloggers and online publishers. It is closer to the Wordpress goal of democratising publishing. Micro.blog can be used that way, but it also functions as an alternative to social media.

I didn’t see the recent WordPress controversy coming a decade ago, but by three years ago when I switched away from WordPress it was clear something like this was on the way.

As it says earlier in this post, I didn’t leave WordPress, WordPress left me.

© Scoop Media

Bill Bennett

Freelance journalist.

Auckland-based Bill Bennett writes technology and business stories that are directly relevant to New Zealand readers.

His emphasis is on telecommunications, but he also covers other aspects of technology and business. You can find his features in the New Zealand Herald and hear him regularly on RNZ Nine to Noon and the NZ Tech Podcast.

Bennett's The Download Weekly newsletter is published every Friday. You can sign up for it here. If you want to support his work, you can make a donation to his PressPatron account.

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