Vanity of Vanities. All is Vanity.
WordPress is now 30 per cent of the web, daylight second
The web-watchers at W3Techs have just noted a milestone: WordPress now accounts for 30 per cent of the world's websites. W3Techs crawls the top 10 million websites as determined by Amazon's Alexa rating service and peers into their innards to figure out what they're running, and sells details reports on its findings. It also …
COMMENTS
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Monday 5th March 2018 06:42 GMT Pomgolian
Wordpress is NOT a CMS
Please stop referring to it as a CMS it isn't. It's a blogging tool. Just because all sorts of crazy shit is built on top of it does not make it a CMS, or even a good idea. It's a piss poor insecure mess that I've had to clean up more times than I care to remember.
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Monday 5th March 2018 08:06 GMT luminous
Re: Wordpress is NOT a CMS
If it only had posts and media then fine. Please tell me how wordpress is NOT a content management system? 30% of the web uses it to manage their website's content.
Probably like trying to say snapchat is only for sexting. It was originally made for that, but is now used by millions to share content, messages and communicate.
Wordpress was originally made only for blogging, but has since evolved to be a pretty decent CMS.
Also you probably should complain to wiki if you feel that strongly about it: "WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress
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Monday 5th March 2018 09:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Wordpress is NOT a CMS
Nowadays the security vulnerabilities come from the plugins, not the Wordpress core. Things like plugins writing their cache to a directory served by the webserver and allow an attacker to specify the filename and content for items to be cached ( ie: gimme_shell_access_please.php )
Developing plugins for it is an awful experience however.
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Monday 5th March 2018 13:34 GMT handleoclast
Re: Wordpress is NOT a CMS
@nevstah
just because you can use a tool for something other than what it was designed for, doesn't mean becomes a different tool.
You missed out a word which invalidates your conclusion. Wordpress was originally designed for blogs. Drupal was originally designed as a CMS. Wordpress evolved into a multi-purpose tool (by adding CMS), as did Drupal (by adding blogs).
One can argue over how well either of those two (and others, such as Joomla) have evolved into multi-purpose tools. One can argue over whether Wordpress's CMS is better or worse than Drupal's CMS or whether Wordpress's blog is better or worse than Drupal's blog. One can argue which of them is a better multi-purpose tool, although that is heavily influenced by what one uses the tool for.
What you can't legitimately argue is that any of them are no good at what they now do based upon what they originally did. You would take exception to me claiming that you are hopeless at coding software because originally all you could do was eat, sleep, cry and shit yourself. Things change.
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Monday 5th March 2018 13:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Wordpress is NOT a CMS
A CMS has a framework to extend it with arbitrary types of *content* backed by SQL tables through an ORM layer. Wordpress has only blog posts, tags, comments, users, a few key-value attribute tables which allow a crude form of extension. It lacks basic features like internationalization, and always will because Automattic wouldn't dare to undermine major commercial plugin developers who provide that functionality via horrid kludges. The further you extend it from a basic blog, the more fragile and expensive it gets.
That said, while Wordpress is utter shit, real CMSes are pretty crappy too, and there's little money to be made working with them.
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Monday 5th March 2018 13:45 GMT Dominion
Re: Wordpress is NOT a CMS
It's easier for non-techies to publish content via a CMS. Which is precisely why I went from a website with flat HTML pages to a CMS. Whilst I'm happy to code HTML with notepad and upload with command line ftp, having a CMS means non-techies can publish content without bugging me to do it for them.
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Thursday 29th March 2018 12:45 GMT The Sprocket
Re: Wordpress is NOT a CMS
"Wordpress is biggest piece of shit I ever seen. How people became convinced it was easier to use than HTML is one of the most stunning con jobs I've ever seen."
Wow. That's a very brave statement. Bravo!
As a career Communication Designer, I do agree though, that it is a con job, as it creates a false illusion that 'anyone' can create an effective web presence. True, any monkey can slap in poorly crafted text, a litany of square-cut photos into a common template, but that doesn't make for a well-crafted piece of communication that stands out in a noisy marketplace. Yes . . . WP is a stunning con job indeed.
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Monday 5th March 2018 09:15 GMT steamrunner
Re: How do they know...
It's pretty easy to tell. If the source code to the main home page is a tangled mush of indecipherable nested code then it's using a CMS. If the mush has at least a tiny bit of structure then it's just using a framework. If you can read and vaguely understand it, it's been hand-coded.
:-)
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Monday 5th March 2018 10:01 GMT rh587
Re: How do they know...
...whether sites run a CMS or not? Many of my sites do but you would never know looking at the source code.
Really?
It's right there in the header:
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 4.9.1" />
And there's usually a "Powered by Wordpress" down in the footer somewhere.
Even if you stripped those out, the entire structure of Wordpress belies it's core. It's not hard to look for URLs in the source pointing at directories with names like "/wp-includes/" or "/wp-content/" unless you've literally gone through the entirety of WP with a find-and-replace to strip out any "wp-" references (which will probably break updates and installed plugins).
Other CMSs will have their own directory structures and distinctive headers which will give away their core, unless they've undergone a ground-up refactoring - which 99.9% of installations won't.
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Monday 5th March 2018 17:49 GMT IneptAdept
Re: How do they know...
https://builtwith.com/
This is just one of a myriad of tools that will tell you what a site is run on via some http requests etc
To be honest I hate wordpress for the reason that anyone can make a dynamic content based website that will let the world + dog do things that professional developers have spent years learning to do properly (mostly)
There is at least 1 major Wordpress outbreak each year because of badly coded extensions or the install not being setup properly etc
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Monday 5th March 2018 20:33 GMT unimaginative
Re: How do they know...
I tried several of my own and clients' sites on built with and it failed to identity the framework behind any of them.
Assuming this survey used I am pretty sure most of the sites that were "no CMS" were built on a framework of CMS that is sufficiently customisable to make it difficult to detect the CMS.
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Monday 5th March 2018 10:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: How do they know...
> ...whether sites run a CMS or not?
For a standard-installation dynamic CMS it is not difficult to find tell-tales. I would be more interested in how could they identify (and discriminate between) static site generators; even if you look for tell-tales of predefined "themes", there are literally thousands of them.
Either way, a useful statistic for plugin vendors perhaps. For users, quantity does not equal quality and quality¹ is a relative measure anyway.
¹ Conformance to one's requirements.
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Tuesday 6th March 2018 01:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Well that's depressing
And let's face it, there are worse commercial offerings that will cost you an arm and a leg and won't deliver the same functionality as WordPress will.
And there, in a nutshell, is the modern world summarised. These days we've become so accustomed to living with shitty solutions because the bar for superiority is set just so fucking low. I've even had it with trades people whereby the job really isn't crash hot but they were the best that you could find. It really is depressing.
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Monday 5th March 2018 12:33 GMT Stork
Re: Well that's depressing
I tried to make our website in Wordpress but gave up in frustration as organising image files did not seem to be supported - I was driving mad. It seemed that you just chucked the into a big pile and if you needed to use the same image again, you uploaded again. I am too old for that.
There were more, but I decided to go with Joomla as that was closer to my way of working. Not perfect, but possible to work with.
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Monday 5th March 2018 10:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Another poor article
> The web-watchers at W3Techs have just noted a milestone: WordPress now accounts for 30 per cent of the world's web sites.
That claim cannot be substantiated. It accounts for 30% of the sites that those chaps monitor amongst the CMS known to them, as their page clearly says.
https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all
But first and foremost, no mention at all of the main finding in those guys' survey? The statistic that 50.2% of the websites monitored do not run a CMS¹ at all?
¹ Known to W³Techs
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Monday 5th March 2018 10:31 GMT Chris Hunt
"Another oddity: Squarespace and Wix, both of which advertise heavily to small business, have 0.9 and 0.5 per cent share among CMS-users respectively."
Not that odd. If you're a non-techie plumber looking to set up a simple website for your business, Wix is probably a reasonable solution (never used it myself, so can't say). But that website is unlikely to make the top 10 million sites on the web, so won't be counted in the survey.
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Monday 5th March 2018 10:58 GMT ellemorgan
You will say one day!
Wordpress is the future of websites. I don't think Google is directly targeting sites just because the CEOs woke up one morning with steam coming out of his ears and decided on a whim to destroy every small business on the planet. Google is targeting all low-grade sites. And the fact is that most affiliate sites add zero value to the internet as a resource. So when you say wordpress is nothing, you know nothing. Google likes WordPress :). I know some other CMS that I love, Joomla, RevGlue.com etc. If you hire a developer, So many bucks will gone.
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Tuesday 6th March 2018 11:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: You will say one day!
Some many elitist jackasses here. It’s accessible and extensible, therefore easier for people to mess up. This has always been true in tech. Haters are probably the same bunch who feel Javascript is the worst language ever. Well, the loser is you because the striving pragmatic industry doesn’t care what you think and will just leave you behind. Yeah PHP sucks too, except some programmers became billionnaires using PHP to actually ACCOMPLISH things, instead of complaining why tools aren’t perfect.
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Tuesday 6th March 2018 01:53 GMT Mark 65
Re: It could be worse...
Except most often it isn't. I known several graphics designer types (who aren't really even proper graphic designers but just did a course) who specialise in charging high fees to create custom websites for idiots with more money than sense that use Dreamweaver to pop out little WWW turds on a regular basis. They got into it because they had time on their hands after the kids went to school full time and it was a nice little earner. They cannot code for shit and have zero concept of the way anything should be setup but can drag, drop, and publish. Job done.
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