A very important distinction indeed. Wordpress.COM is not the same as the self-hosted version at WordPress.ORG
While they've made recent changes to .COM to bring it closer to .ORG mostly as a knee-jerk response to the Matt v WPE scrap, they are still very different experiences.
I rarely advise clients looking to DIY solution to go to WordPress.com
They're still battling out in court, with a timeline that extends into 2027. Meanwhile: (very quick summary) Matt's pulled his developers off the project, and the release schedule has slowed. Some commercial vendors have increased their support, while others have pulled back. Meanwhile the ecosystem of devs and agencies basically shrugged it off. If we need to get rid of Matt we will (with big vendor support), no big deal.
No big deal on splitting the community in half? Matt will not go and you will have half the people supporting him, half forking the project. Actually less than half on each side, when you count in the people that will completely leave the ecosystem...
Splitting the community in half? Nah. If Matt needs to go, the community who is more interested in just making money (we're not "post economic" like Matt) will move aggressively to cut him out like cancer.
Sure he controls a scary amount of the ecosystem NOW, but we've seen big vendors express interest in hosting repositories, and major plugin vendors move quickly to secure their distribution and update models.
My tiny agency has already mitigated many risks and shifted our support towards developers who see a future PostMatt™
We'll be fine because WordPress belongs to us, not Matt.
Copium. Wordpress is dead. Argue all you want. 5 years from now the trajectory of installs/users/commercial opportunity will show that the last year was more than enough to incentivize/motivate the current and potential users to reach for something else. I say this as someone who makes my primary income managing a very large WP/WC shop.
Sure, WP isn't going away overnight. But it's dead in the water at this point. Literally like a dead whale, still going to support an ecosystem for some period of time. Though, it's peak is behind us and the unwinding was accelerated immeasurably.
WordPress is so dead. Vibecoding a page using next.js and using something like sanity so they can make their own changes gets clients so much more for less than WordPress ever did.
IMO in my experience wordpress, as a project regardless of hosting, is coasting but in audience acquisition and new feature production.
They aren't acquiring new customers faster than they are losing existing customers. Squarespace and similar products are to eating it's proverbial lunch among a large portion of their audience (small to medium businesses who just want a website that is easy to update).
If some of the biggest hosters forked wordpress and started adding features that their customers are asking for, that wordpress the organization were ignoring or slow to produce, I think it would be a good thing. Providing wordpress the org with some motivation to compete.
Today I'm sending a link to a client to purchase a license for Paid Memberships Pro. Not because of this, but because it's the best tool for the job. I'll continue to go directly to the developer/source for good plugins.
I've built over 700 WordPress websites and launch 4-5 each month. I expect to launch at least 30 in 2025. AMA and give me your example of something "better" and I'll gladly tell you why it's not. I've spent my career using these tools and deploying them for real people (not marketing departments creating throwaway sites).
This is preference. I just don't see why its anyone's preference. I will just build an admin dashboard that allows a site owner manage their content, however, I'm not building as many sites for other people, so you probably have a better perspective as someone who does it professionally for 3rd parties.
> I will just build an admin dashboard that allows a site owner manage their content
With WordPress, there are 5 different plugins already built that have more features than the dashboard you're planning to build, and the agency/person maintaining the site may already be familiar with them. WordPress and other PHP CMSes may not have the best architectures (Drupal was downright atrocious), but the ecosystem is thriving with pre-built, customizable tools for the 99% of customer needs.
Virtually all web hosts, including very cheap ones support PHP-cgi and MySQL, so deploying WordPress is frictionless. CMSes written in other languages have deployment more friction.
Yeah, this is what it comes down to. WordPress has an incredible following for a great reason: it works well for the people that know how to use it.
Designers and agencies are more than happy to continue to use it, and frankly they should -- it is their bread and butter. The WP drama is news for us web-devs but will affect their market in no way whatsoever.
It's not ironic, although I love irony. I created this throwaway because there's too many clues on my primary account that could lead back to IRL me and Matt is petty like that.
> I joined WP Engine in 2018 because it was the one company that really did seem to be honest about who they were. Like every other company they were in it to make money, but unlike every other company they didn’t hide that fact behind abusive language. They didn’t claim I was “family.” They didn’t claim their work was virtuous and therefore somehow “better” than non-WordPress orgs. No, they said they wanted to be the biggest host and went after that with the best pay I saw in the WordPress ecosystem and interesting work on top of it.
Well said. Our agency chose WP Engine over 8 years ago because they were hands-down the best managed WordPress hosting provider. It revolutionized our WordPress hosting offerings and allowed stable, mostly headache free growth. Without the WP Engine's platform, and their investments in making WordPress hosting modular and safe we'd still be in the stone ages of dedicated/vps hosting.
What kept us as a customer for these 8 years though, has been the quality of support. It can't really be measured, but I've found their support to be unmatched and highly competent over hundreds of interactions.
We've grown over 400% with WP Engine and this entire fiasco with Matt blindsided us. Begrudgingly, we're diversifying our hosting allocations to protect against this new threat but we'd be much happier continuing with just WP Engine.
While they've made recent changes to .COM to bring it closer to .ORG mostly as a knee-jerk response to the Matt v WPE scrap, they are still very different experiences.
I rarely advise clients looking to DIY solution to go to WordPress.com