My name is James Giroux and I am the WordPress Evangelist here at Envato. I’ve been hanging out with a few Envatians lately and one of the questions that comes up is, ‘what do you think the future has in store for WordPress?’
I have my own perspective on this but I thought it might be neat to hear from you, what your thoughts and predictions are?
Where do you think WordPress goes next? What do you think it needs to do in order to get better? Do you think Wix, Weebly and SquareSpace pose a challenge to WordPress’ dominance?
wordpress.com covers that. the .org stuff will always be free…
what does WP need to survive and keep being the best, just keep doing what they do by improving the tools in WP and making it easier for novices to get started with WP which then helps WP get to more people and power more websites.
Weebly / Wix are different to WP and get people started in a basic website before they use WP, not many go from WP to wix… they both have their uses and i don’t think unless Wix can suddenly improve their offering 20x over, they will ever really be competition
In my observation with technology products, the more a new product lowers a barrier to entry for a consumer to produce an end result, the industry changes.
WordPress is excellent at what it does, no question. But it’s forward momentum relies on an industry of people who have made a careers out of using WordPress and its tools to create websites for people who aren’t confident in building websites themselves. And these are the exact people that Wix, Weebly and Squarespace are targeting with their turnkey solutions. W/W/SS aren’t targeting WordPress users, they are targeting their clients.
This doesn’t leave WordPress high and dry, but these turnkey solution do have a substantial portion of the WordPress community’s target market firmly in the crosshairs of their substantial marketing arsenal…
I’ve talked with a friend of mine about this often. But we continually come back to the fact that there will always be people who just can’t or don’t want to figure out how to maneuver SS or Weebly. That sea of people may decrease in size, but it seems to me that the position of human custom web crafters cannot be completely replaced by well crafted scripts. Just as today… so many companies really ought to have been replaced by online businesses, but they are not because so many people want to be able to talk to a human being instead of trust themselves working with machines.
Also, the design aspect is always limited by a certain box. I’m often asked to help customize a SS sight beyond it’s limitations. I trust that as we as web developers remain flexible in this ever flexible market, WordPress will continue to flex as well. I just hope that it’s commitment to backwards-compatibility won’t hinder it from flexing to the extent that it needs to.
These mentioned competitors that try to steal our target audience are all paid. As in subscription-based. I’d personally take anything that it a one off payment instead of a monthly fee product. No matter how cheap that is. Also, I’ve never heard of these three. WordPress by itself is free. By the time our buyers arrive at our products, they had the ability to play around and try things for free. Then they suddenly discover there is a premium side of the story and come here spending their money naturally. They are eased into this and convinced automatically that this has to be better than the free themes and plugins. They are already invested in WP using their time as an asset. But, I’m immediately discouraged by most sites that have a little “pricing” and “premium plans” somewhere. Unless of course I already know that the service is awesome. But if no one recommended them to me I’m not going to experiment with them much.
Don’t you think that WP is easy enough to be used by people like clients of W/W/SS except the complicated WP themes?
Those who are a little bit of tech savvy can even use the easier WP themes. And those who are not at all tech savvy and hiring WP developers to build their websites also wont find Wix and SS easy and will hire developers to build websites in those platforms too.
Many times I see people looking for Wix and SS or Shopify developers. Just my .02.
As a wordpress developer/site designer I get a fair amount of customers coming over to WordPress from Weebly and Wix. The turnkey solutions generally aren’t robust enough to handle a businesses unique requirements. That, alongside growth in WYSIWYG editors in WordPress such as visual composer, cornerstone, etc. will keep WordPress as a the premier content management system on the block.
For the future–I see WordPress slowly moving to a more java script heavy architecture to provide greater user experiences and programming consistency on both the front end and the backend. While I love the PHP language, I’m betting the incorporation of Angular and Node.js is more of an inevitability than a possibility. This will build to more of a web application than a website experience for users.
Really awesome thoughts, direct from the front lines.
I’m curious, In your business is there any scenario is which you’d actually recommend a turnkey solution as a… well… Solution? Opt for that as opposed to WP?
-Low budget (<$150)
-No current web footprint
-Very small with very little chance to need to expand
-“Static” sites with minimal updates
-Temporary test and trial business or product just to gauge interest
-A strong desire for DIY
The reason that most businesses and individuals quickly outgrow the turnkeys are expansion and the need for frequent updates–in general, they’re just not well suited for this.
Outside of this, the ever-passionate WordPress community is a hotbed for debates on where WordPress should go from here. With 22% of websites running on WordPress, a vibrant open-source community, amazing themes and plugins and a developer-friendly mindset, WordPress is stronger today than it has ever been.
So, what’s next? Inspired by WP Think Tank’s recent Future of WordPress panel, we spoke to several prominent members of the WordPress community about their vision for the future of WordPress.