The good and the bad of open source WordPress
Why I believe open source is the best and worst thing about WordPress.
When I first discovered WordPress in 2016, it was merely a tool for me. It was the cheapest and most flexible way to get a website started for my fledgling explainer video business, so I used it.
As a long time blogger and website-maker, since the days of GeoCities, I was very confident I would find WordPress a breeze to use.
I opened up a fresh new install of WordPress for the very first time in my life and was confronted with an intimidating admin interface.
The stuff on the right seemed meaningless and unhelpful, and the stuff on the left was way more complicated than I was used to. What did media library mean and when do I use it?
It was lucky that I’d been making websites and blogging since I was a child. It was also a good thing that I knew WordPress was really really popular. Had it not been for those two things, I would likely have given up. Instead, I powered through, confident that, if millions of people could figure it out, I could too.
After some tinkering, and reading recommendations, I purchased and installed a page builder, Thrive Themes, and started building my site. I watched many tutorials, made tons of mistakes, and got frustrated countless times. But after a month or two, it finally felt like I’d gone from pushing a boulder uphill, to chasing the boulder downhill. Incidentally, I still use Thrive today!
Why Open Source Matters
I owe a big part of my journey to the open source nature of WordPress. Being able to play around for almost no money allowed me the freedom to experiment and make mistakes with little penalty. I didn’t have to worry about paying $50 or even $5 per month for each random side project I start, which allowed me to play around and really deepen my knowledge of building websites.
I bet lots of other people attribute their web building journey to WordPress and open source too.
And that’s likely to be a large reason for WordPress’ popularity. It’s free for anyone to use, so lots of hosts offer it as one of their default options. There are also loads of plugins out there that help you turn your WordPress site into anything you can possibly imagine. It means that a receptionist or a journalist can move from one job to another and easily log into their company’s website, update the opening hours or write a blog post, because everyone is on WordPress.
It means a first-time business owner like myself can create their first website and not worry about making newbie mistakes since the cost of wrong decisions is low – it’s really easy to migrate from host to host, change themes, remove plugins and more.
Where’s It’s Not Perfect
However, open source is not without its drawbacks. Like I mentioned above, the first time I logged into WordPress I found it overwhelming. It’s hard to draw a direct line to the exact reason why, but here are some of the reasons that came to mind:
Firstly, there isn’t a dedicated team with KPIs to hit who are focused on making onboarding super easy for complete beginners. In commercial software, this is typically a top priority as customers who can’t get onboarded, will usually churn, which loses money for the company.
In contrast, in WordPress, we have contributors who are typically seasoned WordPress pros. They no longer remember what it’s like to use WordPress for the first time. And because of the contributor model, we also don’t have enough teams with dedicated UX researchers, product managers, and more for each aspect of WordPress.
In addition, WordPress is largely built by developers with a developer-first mindset. Thus, the teams are conceived from a developer standpoint (performance, multisite, etc) rather than from a user standpoint.
For example, it would be wonderful to have teams focused on the experiences around onboarding, dashboard, plugins, themes, which is how the average user mentally structures WordPress.
Also, it’s impossible to keep track of usage data, so there’s no way to know where people are struggling across the entire WordPress project. This matters because the best way to justify having teams focused on certain aspects of WordPress is to present numbers. However, since we don’t have numbers, it’s impossible to present a strong case.
The final issue is that WordPress is gigantic. It powers everything from The American Whitehouse website, to small businesses in Singapore (like mine). This pins WordPress in a very tricky spot, because the needs of the Whitehouse are very different to the needs of a small business on the equator. And any updates that are made to WordPress have to take the breadth of use cases into consideration.
Ultimately, I’m glad that WordPress is open source, even despite the drawbacks. It helps so many people grow their businesses, communicate, and simply share their thoughts with everyone on the internet. There is no such thing as only good without the bad. And I’m glad WordPress exists.