Ask HN: Why are you using Wordpress?

12 points by jeanniesarah 5 years ago | 8 comments

Since the jamstack + headless cms is gaining popularity these days, for those who are still using Wordpress, why? I'm currently trying to decide what CMS to use. I'm pretty introverted so posting this question was kind of intimidating, thanks for your help!

davismwfl 5 years ago |

Because it works, is well understood, can be used by non-devs and there are tons of plugins that solve pain points. Not saying it is great or perfect, but for the average non-developer trying to stand up a marketing site, landing pages, blogging etc it is the smart choice until there is a reason not to use it. I dislike how it is built overall, not a big php fan either (however I respect it), but it works and doesn't distract valuable dev time to update some marketing copy or changing images or adding a blog post.

Even for developers, if they value their time and are starting a business it is smart to stick the marketing site on Wordpress. It means they can easily hand off tasks on it for lower costs and they can focus their energy on the important parts of the business that will differentiate them. Picking a less common CMS system won't differentiate the product or team, instead it usually just causes more headaches that are avoidable.

My general advice for anyone starting a company and wanting to stand up a basic site is to use wordpress. Build content on it, use it for what it is good at. And use your dev resources in areas that will make the business successful, which is not recreating the wheel.

To me it is the same as if you are starting a e-commerce business you are smart to use shopify, bigcommerce, volusion etc versus building a custom site to handle it. Even better to start with wordpress and woocommerce over some CMS + building & integrating your own commerce platform.

With anything there are exceptions, but just my 2 cents.

codegeek 5 years ago |

Personally when I am blogging, I am not interested in jamstack etc. I just want to launch a decent editor and type my post. WordPress does it well. I then want to self-host it quickly on a server. Again, WP has tons of support with webhosts that I can just install it without hassles (even though I like to get into nginx, php-fpm etc myself just because of the geek I am).

2nd, WordPress comes with a huge community and theme/plugin ecosystem. Yes, thats where WP can get bad too but if you don't abuse the themes/plugins, you can achieve quite a lot with WP without a lot of extra work.

As a professional though who provides websites to clients who then want to manage the content themselves, WordPress is the best CMS by far. Yes it can have issues with performance and security compared to say JamStack but again, if you know what you are doing and don't abuse WP, you will do fine. I cannot tell clients to use JamStack so that gets ruled out for any CMS needs for which WordPress is really really popular for.

If we want to kill WordPress (they came , they tried, they failed), we have to figure out a way to create the same ecosystem, CMS capabilities that WordPress created.

stephen82 5 years ago |

I won't talk about the headless part, but I will talk about WordPress based on my own experience.

It really depends how you use it, WordPress that is.

If your website needs to expand at areas where a vanilla version of WP would not suffice, with custom implementation either via functions.php in your theme or via plugin(s) you can achieve such thing, but with a coming price I'm afraid; bloated database with countless meta data.

Now, don't get me wrong.

If you are experienced with WordPress development, you could implement any solution you want in such way that each one of them would use their own tables and could solve your problem(s).

The thing is, if you need to spend so much time in customization and theme / plugin tweaking, then in my humble, yet naive opinion I would suggest to go with a framework than with WordPress for the sake of sanity; it's a lot easier and way cleaner to achieve the same task in shorter amount of time and effort.

Just...just trust me on that!

I have been doing this with WordPress and WooCommerce for a while now and I know the headaches I face every single time I have to come up with a solution for a customer.

SkyLinx 5 years ago |

I used WordPress for a long time before and never liked it too much. It's very powerful indeed and you can do a lot of things with it, but I think it's overkill for many people if all you want is a blog where to publish your own content.

For this reason I built DynaBlogger (https://www.dynablogger.com) as a fully managed (hosting, backups, updates etc are taken care of do you can focus on content) alternative to WordPress which is simple, to the point and focused on blogging and at the same time much more affordable than Ghost, which is perhaps the most similar product available.

Simple but not too limited like other options in the market, DynaBlogger has all the features one really needs for publishing content baked in. No plugins on purpose - most WordPress plugins are poorly coded and introduce vulnerabilities or performance issues, and I didn't want that.

It has a free plan, so it would be awesome if you could give it a try. I'm looking forward to any feedback

frompdx 5 years ago |

I use WordPress because it is easy to use, there is a plugin for everything, and it allows me to focus on writing articles for my blog instead of fiddling with something new that I would have to take the time to learn. I have contemplated using something else many, many times. I have even contemplated rolling my own solution. But a CMS isn't something I'm really interested in building. I've never edited a single line of PHP for my blog, so the fact that it is built with PHP does not concern me. Sometimes people are surprised I choose to use WordPress instead of inventing something of my own in a programming language I'm passionate about. I always point out that if I did that I would not have time for anything else with the programming languages I enjoy.

bzalasky 5 years ago |

The primary reason I'd reach for the Jamstack over WordPress is security. A static website (relying on a headless CMS or a build/deploy process for content) is much more shelf stable than WordPress if the project isn't updated on a monthly basis. A lot of people have built successful businesses and sites with WordPress and continue to do so (this is what I got my start in consulting ten years ago). That said, WordPress provides a bigger surface area for vulnerabilities with the 3rd party plugin ecosystem and database connection compared to static sites. If you're familiar with it, and prepared to keep it up to date, it may be a good option for you. Otherwise, I'd go with the Jamstack (assuming it can handle whatever your use case is).

marcuswebb 5 years ago |

- Dead simple for content authors. - Almost every need has already been solved by the community so I rarely need to add any important code to the stack. - It has room to grow from a the very basic marketing site it starts as into whatever direction might be needed long term. - It's relatively simple DB setup allows for me (using my typical patterns) to export the data should I need to migrate to a different CMS later without any real pain points.

b0ner_t0ner 5 years ago |

As much as I would like to move away from WordPress, the ecosystem is second to none. If you want to fine-tune any part of WordPress, there are just countless tutorials. Security has been pretty good since 5.x and it just "works"; so hard to move away from now.

Your introversion can be changed, it's just a mindset.