Transcript: Why Wordpress dominates internet?
Read the full transcript of episode #56 of The Startup Project, where host Nataraj Sindam and a web development expert explore the enduring dominance of WordPress. They discuss why it still powers 40% of the internet, analyzing the roles of its strong community, platform extensibility, and the concept of a 'perfect abstraction layer' that keeps it relevant against modern no-code tools.
2023-05-07
Host: WordPress is such an interesting thing in itself, right? Because like I I don't know, like the number of websites on the internet that run on WordPress are still about like 40% or like something crazy like that. It is. Yeah.
In spite of like so many no code, low code tools that come every day with unicorn valuations. I still use WordPress for all my websites because like why not? Like I don't see any like web flow or all these guys coming up with new stuff.
Like I don't see any reason why to use this. Yeah. Like why anyone gets WordPress, right? Yeah. Yeah. What do you think like why does WordPress is so sticky and it's still being used so much?
Uh, it did a really good job of building a strong community around it. Um, there's a huge community of WordPress folks.
And I think uh having the the open source version of it where it was really simple to build on along with the premium side of things, it just served everybody's needs and uh a lot of people could build on it.
So, um, I think I think those are the primary reasons. I mean it's why we got into it originally too. It was a nice simple framework for that ended up being very extensive uh in a variety of ways as well.
Um, are there are there better platforms out there for unique cases? Of course, but but WordPress ends up being extensible enough that you can you can do mostly whatever you need on it.
Particularly now that that uh it's uh really become a robust headless platform. So you're able to you're able to plug it into all kinds of different things in in a variety of different ways.
And the the LMS's uh has been iterated over sorry, not the LMS, the CMS has been iterated over so many different users over, you know, decades now. Um, that that they have a they have a leg up in terms of uh the um user experience.
They they just know how it works because they've had 20 years of or whatever, you have uh users telling them what works and what doesn't. I I have my own theory of why WordPress works so well.
I think part of it is community, but part of it is the abstraction layer at which uh it's built. Like it's it's at the right abstraction level uh where you can deploy it on in your own server. They will give you a deployment option.
Um you can build plugins on top of it. Um, and so the abstraction level it's built on is basically allowing uh because if you remove like go up in the abstraction level a little bit or go down, uh I think it wouldn't work.
And that's one of the reasons why even like Shopify works. It's basically WordPress in every sense, but just optimize it for e-commerce. Right? Like and it's at the same real abstraction level.
And uh you basically abstract away the complicated parts and you give the extensible parts are right there. And that's why I feel like Shopify works as well because it's exactly like WordPress but optimized for e-commerce. Yeah. Yeah.
So I I I feel like the abstraction level was perfect. Like I feel the same with air table. I don't know if you've used air table. Like that was also like a right abstraction level at which a public B2C database has to be built at. Yeah.
No, that's insightful. I I I concur.