I'm glad WordPress is 18 and successful.

I wish it had stronger open source competition.

WP is ripe for disruption in so many areas:

||| Price |||

WP succeeded in part because it was cheap and easy to host. This is still true to an extent but the story is weaker than it was.

WP hosting is a race-to-the-bottom market, but hosting secure, fast WP sites with good backup and support remains valuable. The WP hosting market matured and there are enough customers who won't pay for cheap hosting because they've seen their sites get hacked or experienced performance and reliability issues. This supports an industry offering expensive managed hosting at a high markup tiered by monthly visits.

So it's not surprising that Squarespace/Wix/Shopify price points are no longer the turn-off they used to be for many at the low to mid end, and that larger businesses are looking at Jamstack and static sites for the potential cost savings at the mid to high end.

Takeaway: A CMS built for “start for free” hosting platforms like Cloudflare Pages and Netlify could provide an even more compelling story than WP, reignite the DIY open source site building movement, and be a more natural fit for enterprise customers.

The “Jamstack” movement is the closest thing we have to this, but there's no strong frontrunner that includes both a modern and compelling admin area for publishers coupled to the mechanisms for previewing, building, and deploying a site out of the box. Devs still have to cobble pieces together into a semi-coherent whole. This is currently touted as a strength because you can “use the best tools for your unique scenario”, but it might be healthier for the Jamstack community to start treating this as a major flaw blocking wider adoption instead. That way they could just build a good apple pie instead of asking everyone to first create the universe.

||| Deployment |||

When technical users in a company get to pick the stack, it is easier, cheaper, and faster to deploy to Netlify/Cloudflare|GitHub Pages/Vercel using modern deployment practices (like the ability to preview multiple deployments — one for each PR) than it is to ship updates to a WP host. Cloudflare Pages pricing is also tiered on deploys/month instead of visits/month or bandwidth, which is more palatable for most.

Takeaway: A headless CMS that deployed the admin app and website to an edge network could outperform WP for ease of deployment, performance, affordability, and access to other built-in perks of edge hosting platforms that are hard and expensive to get right with WP today (caching, security).

||| Marketplace |||

WP.org offers free plugins and themes, but it still does not (and may never) offer paid themes and plugins. This makes commercial WP options decentralized, but it provides users with a poor experience: comparing, purchasing, updating, and getting support for paid themes/plugins is a wild west that is still harder and more frustrating than it should be. It also means anyone who wants to sell themes or plugins has to manage their own sales infrastructure.

Takeaway: A CMS platform with a built-in marketplace could be more compelling than WP for end-users. It could also pull plugin and theme developers away from WP — most plugin/theme devs would probably prefer to spend their time making themes and plugins than figuring out how to sell and deliver updates securely.

||| UX and ease of use |||

WP can be overwhelming for new users, in part because of the disconnect between the promise on its homepage (“the freedom to build anything you want“) and the journey people have to go on to achieve that lofty goal.

The main issue is that there is no real guidance — you can build an ecommmerce site or a podcasting network or a gated content blog or a newsletter or even just a simple blog with WordPress, but in all cases you're basically on your own to figure out how to achieve those things. Yes, there are a huge number of blog posts with titles like, “9 Best WordPress LMS Plugins to Sell Courses” and “We Pretended to Test the 46 Best WordPress Contact Form Plugins and Then Just Recommended the One that Gives us the Highest Affiliate Commission” that you can sift through, but WordPress itself gives you very little help.

Takeaway: A modern CMS or user-friendly application platform that claimed you could “build anything you want” would actively help you to do that. It could perhaps offer starter templates for different scenarios, tutorials, or _basically anything at all_ that didn't just dump you into an admin area that was last refreshed in 2013 containing some vestigial apparatus for blogging but no real clues as to how to even succeed with that goal let alone anything more complex.

||| Localization |||

It's 2021 and you still need plugins to translate content in WordPress. Naturally there are a lot of localization plugins that you'll have to compare and experiment with first, and you'll find that all of them offer a worse experience than you can get with a hosted CMS like Contentful or GraphCMS.

The good news is that built-in content localization is on WP's product roadmap, so this should eventually improve. The other positive is that while content localization is pretty bad in WP right now, plugin/theme localization is generally quite good.

Takeaway: there's a small window of opportunity here to present a more compelling content localization experience than WP does by default.

||| PHP and the developer experience |||

A large number of developers who use WordPress would rather not. (WP was the “most dreaded platform” in Stack Overflow's 2020 survey with 67% of developers who are using it not expressing an interest in continuing to do so.[1])

Of more concern for the health of WordPress is that new web developers generally aren't picking PHP. It's not even that PHP is especially bad these days, and even WP APIs are gradually improving — it's just that new developers targeting the web as a platform are probably writing JavaScript or TypeScript. And, because they're not writing PHP, they might not choose WordPress if a compelling alternative existed in the language they prefer.

Yes, Headless WordPress is a thing, and every WP host is jumping on that boat because they can see the writing on the wall. But WP is going to be tightly coupled with PHP for a long time, and that may be an opportunity for a CMS that can attract new blood simply because “we use your favorite language instead of PHP” becomes a competitive advantage.

||| ECommerce |||

WooCommerce is used for a huge volume of transactions ($20 billion a year was mentioned in State of the Word 2020).

But if you need to build an online store today, Shopify is in most cases a quicker and more stable path that will let you focus on your business and products, simply because it's built for commerce out of the box.

If you need to sell products casually, Gumroad/Stripe Payment Links[2] are probably a better choice than WooCommerce.

If you need to gate content behind a paywall on a multi-author content site, Ghost is increasingly a more compelling choice than WP, since it includes subscription commerce as well as audience building and outreach features by default: https://ghost.org/features/

WP can be an ecommerce platform, but it isn't one by default. Making WP do ecommerce feels very much like any other form of digital alchemy or contortion.

A CMS built from day one with commerce and monetization in mind would look quite different to WP. It could be all the more compelling for users who want those options out of the box.

[1]: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-mo...

[2]: https://stripe.com/en-at/payments/payment-links