Data from Google Trends noted search requests around the website builder boomed in October 2024, especially on October 8, where it reached a peak score of 100.

The spike in interest signals a shift in user behavior, indicating an active search for options which align more closely with user expectations around performance, control, and transparency.

  • frezik@midwest.social
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    2 days ago

    I’ve been giving static site generators a go, specifically Hugo. Webdevs have always treated static sites as unserious, but there’s plenty of sites out there where it’d be ideal. An awful lot of those sites are currently on WordPress.

    Does your local mechanics shop need a dynamic site? No. Local restaurant that points you to an external site for online ordering? No. Little gift shop selling locally produced goods? If they don’t intend to sell online, then no. A manufacturer with product pages that have a “where to buy” button that sends you to their sales partner in your country? Nope.

    How many CPU cycles are wasted on these sites that could be nothing more than reading a file and streaming it back to the client?

    • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today
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      2 days ago

      This is a very good point. The other issue is security. The little mechanic shop that has no dynamic content, technically should be static pages, so when it’s left alone and not updated for 3 years it doesn’t get hacked by some WordPress vulnerability.

  • MisterMoo@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    No one’s going to remember this in a year. Remember when Unity supposedly torched their business? They’re doing fine.

    • Arthur Besse@lemmy.ml
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      3 days ago

      I looked at that, and thought “ha, that is a funny and obviously fake screenshot of a headline, created to ridicule photomatt for being petty in his fight with his company’s biggest competitor”.

      Then, after closing this tab I did a double take and thought: maybe it’s actually real?

      And, it turns out, yeah, he really actually did that (after a court injunction required them to remove the checkbox which required users to pledge that they were “not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise”):

      screenshot of wordpress.org login page featuring a "Pineapple is delicious on pizza" checkbox.

      😂

      he's not wrong, though

      screenshot of Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) in his car in The Big Lebowski, with meme style caption "You're not wrong Walter, you're just an asshole"

    • bitwise@lemmy.ca
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      3 days ago

      Billionaire power is corrosive to maturity; you can make everyone do what you want, so why find common ground or compromise when you can just throw a shitfit and demand that people agree that pineapple is tasty?

      Just think, they could’ve spent this energy making WordPress not suck for Kubernetes deployments instead, but that’s fine, we can settle for being told what to think and feel instead.

      🤡

      Can’t wait for Google to add a required login checkbox that says “I accept that Jesus Christ is the one true Lord and Savior”…

      And I’m being downvoted. Cute.

      Keep em coming, kids. Nothing I’ve said is wrong.

        • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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          3 days ago

          Afraid you have to look elsewhere, this is a sweet-salty treat. Use some mild cheese, like Sprintz.

          • haverholm@kbin.earth
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            3 days ago

            I’m genuinely curious, can’t find many banana pizza recipes that aren’t smeared with nutella as well. I assume this is a white pizza base since you mention mascarpone? Then banana topping with a sprinkle of grated hard cheese?

            • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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              2 days ago

              White pizza base woul maybe work too (up for testing) but i just use less tomato. Cutting banana lengthwise, olives around, blotches of mascarpone, olive oil and mild grated hard cheese and pepper & salt over all.

              But Nutella, wth?

              • haverholm@kbin.earth
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                3 days ago

                Ooh, that is salty! Will give it a try next time the family isn’t around to turn up their noses at my kitchen experiments.

                Yeah, Nutella… I think it was the banana+pizza search query that sent me into crêpe-adjacent dessert territory.

  • Zak@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    It’s open source. The alternative, if project governance actually starts making problems for end users is that someone will fork it. Cloning the plugin/theme repository makes that a bit more hassle, but it’s entirely doable.

    That’s not to say there’s no room for more CMS projects. Wordpress is a little clunky, and variety is good.

  • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
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    3 days ago

    Is there a better alternative though?

    I was pretty disappointed at the options for a FOSS CMS when I last looked a year or so ago. Ghost looked good but is held back by the lack of a genuine plugin system.

    • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      I moved to a static site generator, Hugo in this case, because I felt that WordPress was too much for a simple website with some articles.

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
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      3 days ago

      Drupal has been the main competitor for decades, but the biggest difference is that it’s not blog-style with a timeline of posts, it’s nodes and categories.

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.netOP
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      3 days ago

      WordPress itself isn’t a problem. Leach away my FOSS fans. Heck, customization up the wazoo. For a developer, it’s really really easy to make it your own. A competent developer can be taught WordPress CMS and understand what’s under the hood within a few weeks.

      Contributing back to WordPress? Getting harder and harder with Matt being the biggest barrier.

      It’s becoming one of those scenarios like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Fuck those companies. But I’ll build apps on your platform and play by your stupid ass rules to earn a living while also giving you the finger.

    • zout@fedia.io
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      3 days ago

      There’s a fork of Wordpress which still has the old editor, which looks fine to me. I don’t know anything about the people behind it though, and haven’t yet tried it myself.

    • umbraroze@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      If I were building a larger site, I’d probably use Drupal.

      It’s a bit of a departure from the “blogware” mindset though. You’re not managing “posts” and “static pages”. You’re managing stuff. …Which can manifest itself as pages or posts. Different kinds of content, different kinds of fields. Blogware gets hacky if you are posting anything but pages and posts, but in Drupal, every type of content is equally tweakable.

    • OmegaLemmy@discuss.online
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      3 days ago

      I actually don’t mind Gutenberg, but I fucking hate how I have to do everything with buttons and interfaces and all the paid half baked plugins I have to either spend a week developing myself or pay 40 dollars a month just to Access it for a year in a single domain or site and have to make botched multi language multi site networks that can’t even effectively share a theme and an awful theme that I was told was good but I can’t even set a fucking sidebar so I go into the fucking theme folder and MODİFY TBE FUCKİNG THEME MFSELF FUCK J SHOULD’VE JUST USED HUGO

    • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 days ago

      Interesting, I tried the migrator plugin on my basic 2 page site and none of my plugins or theme are compatible with ClassicPress. It wants me to drop all the way back to the 2017 base theme.

      Great for a new site I suppose.

      • ctenidium@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        I think it’s maybe not for everyone nor suitable for every project. But I think it’s a cool idea and maybe i will use it for rather conservative projects.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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    3 days ago

    The spike in interest signals a shift in user behavior, indicating an active search for options which align more closely with user expectations around performance, control, and transparency.

    Good. Maybe people still can draw conclusions from the barrage of security holes in plugins (of which anything other than a blog had way too much and shouldn’t have used a blogging engine from start).

  • Naich@lemmings.world
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    3 days ago

    Anything community produced with a tool to transfer over WP sites would do pretty well at the moment.

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
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      3 days ago

      One of the big selling points of Wordpress has been customization, so it’s unlikely you’ll be able to directly transfer anything more than the raw post. Any plugins you were relying on will not exist.

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.netOP
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      3 days ago

      WordPress does provide a rest API, so you can do headless WordPress. It’s essentially your content/data in JSON. From that point, you can do whatever.

      The issue is you still need a CMS, or use WordPress.

      • LibreHans@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        The data format in wordpress is ridiculously bad though, if you just want to get content from an api use a decent framwork.

  • ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    it is not about wp engine. wordpress has just gotten really shit. gutenberg forced onto users eventhough it is the worst rated plugin in history. connect to wordpress,woocommerce,elementor,yoast so they also have a store to sell you shit with a subscripton. woocommerce pdf slip plugin…4$/month on the woostore…

    enshittification has won this game.

    • KneeTitts@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      wordpress has just gotten really shit. gutenberg forced onto users eventhough it is the worst rated plugin in history

      meh I make entire sites with gutenberg, nothing was forced on me cuz I could have used (yuk) elementor… I prefer not to

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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    3 days ago

    The point of free software is that it doesn’t have owners and you (individually or collectively) can just create an “alternative” yourself by forking it if you disagree with anything its maintainers do.