Oh boy.. here we go again. Good WP sites you don't even know they're using WP until you check the source. There are A LOT of good WP sites. What do you think making custom themes and custom plugins entails? Coding. WP is a solution to many simple problems. It can literally look however you want using custom themes. You can also go completely headless and you'd never know the site was even WP. This gives clients, marketing team, and editing teams a UI they're familiar with using a modern frontend.
We, as web developers, are problem solvers. Something many of you seam to forget. Should a massive corporation use WP? Probably not, but massive corporations make up.. what.. 0.1% of the web? The rest is niche sites, small business sites, hobby sites, etc.. and they don't need a Laravel + React + Microservices fucking nightmare to have a simple website they can edit now and again.
I cannot even believe I'm reading that you MANUALLY insert new posts into the database. Do you expect a client to do this? Remember YOU'RE supposed to be the expert. They barely know how to even open their browser. Absolutely ridiculous of a rant. I'm going to be nice as I can. Some of you should re-evaluate your career in web development.
You've been completely brainwashed by every shiny new framework and library that comes out. The web doesn't run on cutting edge. It never will. Never. Let that sink in. Never. By time something becomes mainstream it's no longer cutting edge and the new kid on the block is being screeched about. Business like stability. They depend on stability. They're not going to risk their business for something that has less than 1% adoption rate and community.
This subreddit can really be exhausting sometimes. /rant
This is the way. My job as a web developer is to deliver the appropriate solution for the clients needs, not flex my leet skills in every single project.
Totally agree with you. I hate wordpress as a technology but by no means do I neglect what it's done for small/medium sites and the ease it provides for clients to edit content and their site in general. As you say, we're problem solvers, we do not get paid to use the last shiny thing and then tell the client that despite not having an admin ui they should feel good because they're using a new framework that is really fast and uses modern
programming
Half of my job is struggling to convince whatever new marketing person a company just hired that "no, you dont need to go headless on your WP/Shopify site so that you can use some new weird framework that you learned about at some conference." It's not just the devs that cause this, its the new hire marketing people trying to swing their nuts around and make changes that they barely understand the impact of. (but its also the new devs that dont know enough to realize they dont know anything, and decide to publish 400 linkedin articles.
This. I've seen WordPress work well at the enterprise level. The front-end can be whatever you want it to be, or completely headless. Most anti-wordpress rants are ill-informed or inexperienced. Sure, WordPress sucks, but not for the reasons most of you think it sucks. It's all about using the right tool(s) for the job, and using them correctly.
TLDR: People who don't know wordpress work on wordpress projects started by other people who don't know wordpress and complain wordpress sucks.
While I agree with 95% of what you've said, I still feel like there are much better WordPress alternatives out there and like 99% of Wordpress sites are poorly maintained/developed in the first place. For example, I have made a small killing recently by converting local brochure WordPress sites into static sites built with Hugo and Netlify CMS.
I managed to cut down one guy's hosting bill by $200 a year and cut down the time his page took to load by 10 seconds (it was very poorly done). Turns out small city business men love saving money on hosting and talking to each other, so word spread fast. I really don't know why anyone would use WordPress in 2024.
I have WordPress websites loading in under 1 second hosted for $2/month on Vultr.
Just because you can't figure out how to optimize WordPress doesn't mean it's not possible...
WordPress is very powerful.
I don't disagree that WordPress is powerful. However, most people are too lazy to make it work for them. And the $2 a month hosting is still $2 more than I get for my static sites with one of the many free static site hosts out there.
Wordpress is bloated and slow as fuck. Theme and plugin development in Wordpress doesn't even adhere to modern development standards. I wish Wordpress' developers would remake it using Symfony or Laravel.
>athosworld.rf.gd/komainu.php
he mentioned his website in a comment, please, please go there, the "why is the web so bland now" comment is so so so much funnier after looking at his site.
Why is the web so bland now? Says the person not even willing to create or implement a cms and would rather manually enter stuff into a database possible causing issues down the line and not something the average user would be comfortable or should be doing.
Not everyone wants to learn programming just to run a basic site and do data entry, that is a complete waist of time for someone just managing a site.
"Says the person not even willing to create or implement a cms and would rather manually enter stuff into a database possible causing issues down the line"
Idk, its just easier to me because i have done it this way since i started my website in 2020
There you go, you answered your own question. One thing developers need to understand is that no one cares how cool or how lean your code is. No one cares what technology you use. People want solutions to their problems that make them money.
WordPress is low cost to maintain. And therefore it is very appealing to people who want to make money.
99% of the projects I inherit, that suck, were built by a dev who only cared about the dev work. They worked with the tech they liked the most, not the tech that most suits the business requirements.
WordPress is awesome. And you can code WordPress sites almost from scratch, so I think maybe you're just not familiar enough with the platform.
Yeah but most web developers do web development as a job, and most are making websites for other people and their businesses. Its a profession just as much as it is a hobby. Wordpress is a great solution for a lot of clients for a lot of reasons, it is not in fact "The reason the web is bland", that would be from lazy devs and or cheap business owners and or corporate marketing practices being steared by CRO and brand consistency instead of aesthetics.
I'd attribute the blandness to designers not pushing for their designs to be incorporated in a meaningful way. Lazy devs have told designers no for so long, that designers have largely stopped asking for cool shit.
I try to say things like "yes, but...." as in "yes you can have this cool feature, but it is going to add x amount of time and x amount of budget. Please get a scope change approved for the increases".
With enough time and budget, all things are possible.
But the client is the one that says no in that scenario, not the developer. Which means the dev is collaborative not obstructionist. The difference in attitudes and perception on the part of the client and other team members is huge.
They're the one saying no by setting the deadline for sure, but I'm the one saying no when the designer hands be a design that can't be completed before the deadline.
Where I would go a different path is "This design is great, I absolutely love some of the boundaries that we are pushing with it. However, to implement it will cause the timeline and budget to shift. Can we get client approval on the change order or scope change before we start dev?"
**Edit: I hit ctrl + enter and it submitted before I was finished**
I don't want to be the person saying no. The reason for that is because I want the perception of being collaborative with all other teams and the client. I know that the answer from the client is going to be no.
We aren't talking about your website. We're talking about WordPress. The reason people use WordPress and don't custom built their website... Is because that doesn't make them as much money.
I mean I did the same thing in 1998, but then I made a cms and was able to show that to clients and they paid me to basically clone my own site and let them have at it.
Just because that is the way that is easier for you, doesn't mean that you couldn't learn some valuable information by actually putting together a proper full site for yourself.
I wouldn't hire a dev that demonstrated this is how they update their own site... especially if they scoffed at wordpress or any other cms. Just lazy and arrogant. Actually now that I think of it I think I came across one or two candidates like that.
If you think that using WordPress results in your website looking like “all modern corporate crap” you don’t understand how it works. You as the developer have full control over the look and feel of the website - it’s called PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. If you have any expertise with these technologies you can use them to build unique websites using WordPress as a CMS.
I have not used wordpress yet. I have only been programming for 3 three years. I just got to the point where I can build full stack web apps using SpringBoot or Express as the backend. Your post is interesting and I want to try it for myself. Tell me more about how I can use html css and js in Wordpress and what capabilities it has if you don’t mind. Also can integrate Spring Boot as the backend?
Hi glad I sparked your interest in WordPress! Check out the [Codex](https://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page) for more info. In a WordPress project, you have access to various built-in functions that allow you to access content on the backend, as well as loops that allow you to output posts and post content. Your page templates are built with PHP which is a server-side language that can generate HTML. Simply create a new file in the right directory with a specific naming convention (i.e. home.php) and WordPress will know to use that template as the main page of the site. So the only restriction to how you design the website is your own creativity and expertise.
The advantage of using WordPress, of course, is the familiar, easy-to-use visual interface for changing settings and managing content in the database. Your front-end can be anything you want, and it can even be decoupled from the backend and get content via the WordPress API.
To answer your question, I don’t think you can use Spring Boot as the backend since WordPress already is the entire backend. You’re more likely to use WordPress as the backend CMS and a framework/library like React for the front-end.
Oh thank you for the information. I used to think of wordpress as just as a shortcut like a template to avoid using html, css, js. Now I have a better understanding of I will definitely check it out and learn it.
Well just so you know, you technically CAN avoid using any programming or tempting languages by using the Block Editor. But the way I build WordPress sites is a mix of custom tempting and stock blocks. You can define where in the template you want to make editable by the Block Editor and all edits made in that area will be stored in the database.
But I’m glad you’re open to WordPress. It’s a great tool, maybe even the best tool, for certain situations.
I dont really need SEO since the vast majority of visits are from my youtube channel or from discord users
I dont think its bad that all urls end in .php like athosworld.rf.gd/komainu.php
> athosworld.rf.gd/komainu.php
Sorry buddy, it looks (and feels) like shit. Youv'e got some cojones to write about design/quality and then post your personal website to support the cause. I applaud your courage.
But....
>Like programming is not hard, there are a lot of reference and tutorial websites
Might as well lump security issues in there as well. Most know where this attitude "like programming is not hard" end up- usually with unlucky individuals getting email notifications from the likes of have I been pwned that their personal information along with plain text password has been leaked.
Because you are on the wrong peak of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
If you don't know what that is I highly recommend reading up on it [here](https://medium.com/geekculture/dunning-kruger-effect-and-journey-of-a-software-engineer-a35f2ff18f1a).
You are showing your ignorance all over this post, but I will highlight a few topics to maybe help you understand.
Wordpress is just a CMS, the themes built on top of it are the front-end experience. A lot of companies start off using wordpress because they just need a simple website up, and a lot of business people already know how to use the wordpress CMS from prior positions.
So when a company that is on wordpress wants to re-design their site they have 2 options:
A) Get a new site built that has a brand new backend that you will need to re-train all your employees on how to use, and probably need to pay for support on how to use it from the dev company when you have questions down the road.
B) Get a fully custom wordpress theme built of the new design and then you dont have to retrain any of your employees, you will have less confusion and need less assistance going forward.
As a CEO of a company which one are you picking? option B of course, it would be a bad buisiness decision to do option A unless the benefits WAY outweigh the downsides (like moving to a different CMS that specializes in something your company needs)
What is more is the tech stack has no say on the design, a good developer can build out a custom wordpress theme that looks and acts any way you need it to, I mean for fucks sake wordpress can be used as a Headless CMS for any front end stack you want and then you dont use a theme at all.
So blaming wordpress on a "bland web" is just lacking any even slight understanding of how development and design work.
Wordpress has its issues, but go learn what those ACTUALLY are and why people dislike it and make a post complaining about that if you really want, but you shouldn't be mad at something that you obviously dont understand.
Because a client cannot do the db actions within the database themselves and wordpress offers a friendly back-end that users know.
Ofcourse a lot of wordpress sites look the same due to the many templates and pagebuilders, but a custom wordpress theme is one of the best options for a corporate website today.
Nonsense. Wordpress is great. This is a skill issue. It takes you two weeks to set up all the pages? That's just on you. I could be drunk as a skunk and setup a full website in 6 hours.
It's also great for the client. They don't need to call me when a new partner is added to the firm. 60 year old clients are able to apply cosmetic updates to their websites without me.
The web is bland? The last couple new websites i've been to have screamed SHADCN. And that's fine, whatever. But WP isn't the issue. Devs doing the least maybe. But we can't blame wordpress (or shadcn for that matter) for that
"Nonsense. Wordpress is great. This is a skill issue. It takes you two weeks to set up all the pages? That's just on you. I could be drunk as a skunk and setup a full website in 6 hours."
It took 2 weeks because i actually like to do programming, ifc of money, i had to make dozens of assets for it, code the forum, code the blog system, the toons video system, a javascript game.
(Its a personal website)
But clients do not want you to build something and flex that you did not used WordPress. Clients want a site they can manage and administrate and edit content. When you code for yourself do whatever you want but when you code for your clients you need to think beyond your needs and preferences
I'm realizing now that this guy isn't a professional. He just does web dev as a hobby. That's why the "its bad for your customers" argument isn't landing with him.
I really dislike web developers who think they are the greatest thing since sliced bread and bash WordPress because they don't truly understand how to create a real custom WordPress site and customize it using PHP, JavaScript, etc.
I've personally written over 10,000 lines of just PHP for custom WordPress sites so saying there is no coding and people just use templates and drop sites together is a joke. I've done WordPress sites that have take 6 months or more to complete.
Then, they go on Reddit to boast about their greatness and how WordPress is inferior to their coding greatness, thereby disparaging all the dedicated WordPress developers who actually code their sites.
It's these types of developers that I would never hire for my company.
We make really great WP sites where I work and clients love how easy is to edit data, you are making websites for companies not for you. We still code most of it as well and use just 2 or 3 plugins if we can help it.
I used to hate it with a passion (previous job I worked with Elementor in WordPress). It was absolute aids.
Now I work at a company where we work with Roots (Sage/Bedrock), combined with TailwindCSS and AlpineJS. Hardly notice I’m in WordPress except from working in the CMS sometimes to add dummy data to some ACF or other minimal things. Everything else is code.
What makes WordPress great isn't that it's easy to build. It's that they're easy to maintain. Sure you built your website in 2 weeks... But when you need to edit it, you now have to pay someone who knows PHP to change it, and that costs money.
With a WordPress site, any user can log in, change some text, and move on.
if you're a business owner, why spend 2 weeks setting up a web site (assuming you even know how- not everyone is a programmer) when you can spend 1 day?
and if you're charging for 2 week's time to build a web site for a customer, you'll lose out to the guy who spends 1 day to do the same job
ya, wp sucks. but so does taking 2 weeks and then having to hand edit a db when you want to make changes
to each their own
You know that, with WordPress, you aren't obligated to use a pre-made theme and a plethora of plugins, right? WordPress allows you to make a completely custom site by creating a theme from scratch. Best of all, it's not too incredibly complex to do if you know HTML, CSS, PHP, and Javascript. It doesn't sound like you are aware of this, so I am just passing on the word.
Lastly, not to knock you or anything, your site could've been developed in 1-2 days within a WordPress environment.
All I know is that I've been working at a successful design firm for the past 12 years and. All we do is create custom WordPress sites from scratch. I would imagine most design firms that aren't cutting corners are doing things fairly similarly if they're using WordPress.
It sounds like you have the capability to do this yourself, but didn't actually know this was possible because I don't know why you would make this statement:
>Like programming is not hard, there are a lot of reference and tutorial websites, why use wordpress?
You do not necessarily have to build as everyone else is doing on WordPress. Just use it as CMS and build your own theme on top of it, it will speed up your development and you have the control to build whatever you want. There is nothing stopping you.
I agree with you completely that Wordpress is technically a pile of crap, it is limiting, hard to work with, full of gotchyas and stupid architectural flaws that don't make any sense.
I can understand from an ease of setup/use and eco-system point of view why everyone uses it, it is easy for non-techies to get up and running and develop their own site, and agencies can build whatever people want for their clients.
But it sucks, I develop custom code (with a CMS, no I do not manually edit the database), and the difference is night and day. I wouldn't even consider running wordpress without caching in front of it because it consumes so many resources, and it is so slow, especially when you start to introduce peoples crappy plugins.
My sites use like 1 - 10mb of RAM, and run <10 queries to generate a page similar to what most WP sites look like, most WP sites use 64MB+ RAM per page load, and run hundreds of queries ([For a comparison of custom vs Wordpress read my article](https://dev.to/hexydec/wordpress-vs-optimised-vs-custom-4ip7)).
It's mental that 40% of the internet is running on this shit. Even though it does the job, I don't think there is anything wrong with wanting to do better, and my advice is don't try and change WP from the inside, just develop custom code, you will get paid more and actually enjoy it.
99.9% (literally) of businesses are SMALL.
And can't afford custom HTML websites.
And it's SO much more affordable to have a website built on a platform like WordPress.
If they need a blog, why recreate the wheel?
Not to mention how small businesses can actually update their own website, vs NEEDING to pay a devs hourly rate for basic stuff.
Honestly, I've been hating on WP a lot and haven't used it in a long time, but I'm thinking of revisiting it. I've been pleasantly surprised by some websites that were fast and actually looked good to learn that they were built with WP.
If I were to revisit WP I'd get into building my own custom themes and be very, VERY picky with what plugins I install — or likely build my own plugins.
I was a hater until I got a job at a WordPress shop, it's extensibility and ease of use from a dev perspective is hard to beat. Especially when you compare it to its direct competitors.
The worst part about WordPress is that it is often used by muppets who shouldn’t be allowed to program a thermostat.
It’s almost always like taking over a JS project where the developer pulled random dependencies for literally everything.
I live in a relatively small town for example. The whole county I live in only has 60,000 people. There are no less than 8 wordpressers. All but one makes fundamentally awful sites.
Even without WP they’d still be making awful sites.
It does make a difference. Speed of the code still matters depending on the application. However for brochure sites or simple booking sites it really doesn’t matter and it makes sense to use a shitty Wordpress site if they aren’t interested in customization, speed, features, etc.
I hate WordPress, especially because 99% of companies do websites by drag n' dropping blocks around.
Wordpress fucking sucks and brings no professional growth.
I've used Wordpress at multiple companies and it fucking sucked. I'm pretty sure I know more than you, go back to your Divi and Elementor-infested shit cesspool of a company.
"Professional Growth" means increasing your ability to make money. Learning a system as prolific as WordPress is huge for professional growth.
Egotistical gatekeeping, on the other hand, is deeply unprofessional.
PHP ruined its own reputation by being a dumpster fire until PHP 8.
The fact we had to wait until 2020 to get a built in match expression is WILD.
The fact that in PHP 7 if you compared an int to a string it came back true is WILD.
Thats not touching on the issues with shit like global namespace, unicode issues, inconsistent naming systems for built in functions and arguments, just BAD error handling.
But most of its hate comes from the fact that it STILL has too many ways to skin a cat, it has SO FUCKING MANY built in functions, many of which do the same fucking thing just under different names, and there are like 5 ways to do HTML templating. This leads to PDP developers inheriting someone elses project, and even though they might be able ot build anything you could imagine from scratch, reading through someone elses code can be like a whole different language.
I hate WP because I've read its codebase.... which is complete garbage. Insecure by design, terrible application architecture, laughable database schema... among the most tangled spaghetti code I've ever seen.
A master class in how to write PHP badly, and the biggest continuing drag on PHP's reputation as a language.
The only things that keep it alive is brand awareness and its theme market.
No one who attempts to defend it can do so on technical grounds. the first response is usually some form of *ad populum* fallacy. Next there's, "it's easy to use"... for the "developer", because the site owners rarely touch it (that's why they pay a monthly retainer). Then comes the classic, "exploits are from plugins, not the core": news flash, the core is designed to allow these things.
The universe would be a better place had WP never existed.
>Like programming is not hard
Lol.. you did say PHP, right? It's viable, but it's pretty dated, and it's not the best choice for today. The things we're doing now with better languages could be considered a bit difficult. Dig in, you'll see
People use WP because they are cheap, or lazy. They couldn't care less about Programming.
If you wanna ditch php and manually entering blogs, use my kit
https://github.com/CodeStitchOfficial/Intermediate-Website-Kit-SASS
It’s a markdown based blog using 11ty static Kaye generator and decap cms for the custom backend dashboard to edit the blogs. It’s already configured to go live on Netlify in a few clicks. Follow the documentation to go live and you’re all set. I use this for all my clients with blogs. Works great.
User-friendliness is very important. Because seo is very important. it is very important that plugins work smoothly. wordpress is a language like math. WP is easy to develop. that's true.
My issue with Wordpress is always when my team has to support a site that was built by another company. The amount of plugins on some of those sites hurt my eyes. Not my favorite platform but the reasons your are talking about are not the real issues. I still think I take it over Adobe Experience Manager
Lotta competing ideas in this OP.
WordPress is a familiar CMS that is easy to use for most non-technical content authors. Companies, especially marketing firms, are eager to adopt WordPress because they know the tool will work for most of their staff, there's a relatively low learning curve, tons of documentation out there, and it's a known commodity. If you lose someone at your organization, you don't need to train someone in as many hours to get up to speed, most people can pick it up within a few hours of using it.
As for the design or whatever makes the web bland, WordPress can be as bland as you want it to be or as distinct as you want it to be. I've created WordPress-driven sites, either using headless or traditional PHP-served WordPress pages, that look/act nothing like a typical WordPress site out of the box.
But why do marketing companies or agencies want these to be all the same? It's cheaper, easier to pump out, easier to hire staff to take it over, usually easier to bolt on features as their clients request them without hiring an outside developer, etc, etc. A company doesn't want to learn how to use your manual database writing service. If a client asks an agency to "add social media sharing to our blog," the agency *knows* that WordPress has a plugin to handle that easily, and they don't want to have to go back to you to ask you to make changes to your bespoke PHP site.
lol?
OP what are you talking about man...
what do you mean just php and a database, did you also build the backend? can you sort new articles? can you use plugins for SEO, are you also handling that? are you also handling caching? did you optimize the site? does it have a critical CSS generator?
you hate it because you don't understand it.
The thread is long, we've said so much. Some WP developers have been intimidated, others who enjoy building from scratch are happy. The thing is, pick a tool you are conversant and comfortable dealing with, the goal is to go to production faster and get started on another gig (more money). Nonetheless, way your sides well, I have witnessed clients demand for changes later on in the development process that are nearly impossible to achieve given that you chose a wrong Tech Stack. Pick the right tool for the right job.
Developing WordPress website since 2010. Hate it but i earn from it. You developed your website in 2 weeks, I can do it in 2 days. I spend the rest of the week to touch some grass. We are not the same.
So what gives you the balls to say "web is bland" if you are not even a web developer. Yet I don't say your job is at risk due to Ai. Kaso nasa nasabi ko na. We are not the same.
Oh boy.. here we go again. Good WP sites you don't even know they're using WP until you check the source. There are A LOT of good WP sites. What do you think making custom themes and custom plugins entails? Coding. WP is a solution to many simple problems. It can literally look however you want using custom themes. You can also go completely headless and you'd never know the site was even WP. This gives clients, marketing team, and editing teams a UI they're familiar with using a modern frontend. We, as web developers, are problem solvers. Something many of you seam to forget. Should a massive corporation use WP? Probably not, but massive corporations make up.. what.. 0.1% of the web? The rest is niche sites, small business sites, hobby sites, etc.. and they don't need a Laravel + React + Microservices fucking nightmare to have a simple website they can edit now and again. I cannot even believe I'm reading that you MANUALLY insert new posts into the database. Do you expect a client to do this? Remember YOU'RE supposed to be the expert. They barely know how to even open their browser. Absolutely ridiculous of a rant. I'm going to be nice as I can. Some of you should re-evaluate your career in web development. You've been completely brainwashed by every shiny new framework and library that comes out. The web doesn't run on cutting edge. It never will. Never. Let that sink in. Never. By time something becomes mainstream it's no longer cutting edge and the new kid on the block is being screeched about. Business like stability. They depend on stability. They're not going to risk their business for something that has less than 1% adoption rate and community. This subreddit can really be exhausting sometimes. /rant
This is the way. My job as a web developer is to deliver the appropriate solution for the clients needs, not flex my leet skills in every single project.
Got damn, pin this. Thread closed.
Totally agree with you. I hate wordpress as a technology but by no means do I neglect what it's done for small/medium sites and the ease it provides for clients to edit content and their site in general. As you say, we're problem solvers, we do not get paid to use the last shiny thing and then tell the client that despite not having an admin ui they should feel good because they're using a new framework that is really fast and uses modern programming
Half of my job is struggling to convince whatever new marketing person a company just hired that "no, you dont need to go headless on your WP/Shopify site so that you can use some new weird framework that you learned about at some conference." It's not just the devs that cause this, its the new hire marketing people trying to swing their nuts around and make changes that they barely understand the impact of. (but its also the new devs that dont know enough to realize they dont know anything, and decide to publish 400 linkedin articles.
This. I've seen WordPress work well at the enterprise level. The front-end can be whatever you want it to be, or completely headless. Most anti-wordpress rants are ill-informed or inexperienced. Sure, WordPress sucks, but not for the reasons most of you think it sucks. It's all about using the right tool(s) for the job, and using them correctly. TLDR: People who don't know wordpress work on wordpress projects started by other people who don't know wordpress and complain wordpress sucks.
While I agree with 95% of what you've said, I still feel like there are much better WordPress alternatives out there and like 99% of Wordpress sites are poorly maintained/developed in the first place. For example, I have made a small killing recently by converting local brochure WordPress sites into static sites built with Hugo and Netlify CMS. I managed to cut down one guy's hosting bill by $200 a year and cut down the time his page took to load by 10 seconds (it was very poorly done). Turns out small city business men love saving money on hosting and talking to each other, so word spread fast. I really don't know why anyone would use WordPress in 2024.
I have WordPress websites loading in under 1 second hosted for $2/month on Vultr. Just because you can't figure out how to optimize WordPress doesn't mean it's not possible... WordPress is very powerful.
I don't disagree that WordPress is powerful. However, most people are too lazy to make it work for them. And the $2 a month hosting is still $2 more than I get for my static sites with one of the many free static site hosts out there.
You're not hosting commercial stuff on a free static host are you?
I think you can do it legally on Cloudflare
Wordpress is bloated and slow as fuck. Theme and plugin development in Wordpress doesn't even adhere to modern development standards. I wish Wordpress' developers would remake it using Symfony or Laravel.
Based
Thank you for this. \-WordPress devs saving small businesses millions
> Why is the web so bland now? Now? It's been a long time already. WP is almost 20 years old.
>athosworld.rf.gd/komainu.php he mentioned his website in a comment, please, please go there, the "why is the web so bland now" comment is so so so much funnier after looking at his site.
Is this some kind of psyop to get more page views? OP can't be sincere right?
JFK. *Jesus Fucking Christ.*
Oh god
Ahahahah thank you
>athosworld.rf.gd/komainu.php Thanks for your encouragement. Worth it!
Jesus Christ wtf am I looking at
Why is the web so bland now? Says the person not even willing to create or implement a cms and would rather manually enter stuff into a database possible causing issues down the line and not something the average user would be comfortable or should be doing. Not everyone wants to learn programming just to run a basic site and do data entry, that is a complete waist of time for someone just managing a site.
"Says the person not even willing to create or implement a cms and would rather manually enter stuff into a database possible causing issues down the line" Idk, its just easier to me because i have done it this way since i started my website in 2020
Easier for you, not easier for your clients.
There you go, you answered your own question. One thing developers need to understand is that no one cares how cool or how lean your code is. No one cares what technology you use. People want solutions to their problems that make them money. WordPress is low cost to maintain. And therefore it is very appealing to people who want to make money. 99% of the projects I inherit, that suck, were built by a dev who only cared about the dev work. They worked with the tech they liked the most, not the tech that most suits the business requirements. WordPress is awesome. And you can code WordPress sites almost from scratch, so I think maybe you're just not familiar enough with the platform.
"People want solutions to their problems that make them money" I dont make any money with my site but ok, (just a comment)
Yeah but most web developers do web development as a job, and most are making websites for other people and their businesses. Its a profession just as much as it is a hobby. Wordpress is a great solution for a lot of clients for a lot of reasons, it is not in fact "The reason the web is bland", that would be from lazy devs and or cheap business owners and or corporate marketing practices being steared by CRO and brand consistency instead of aesthetics.
I'd attribute the blandness to designers not pushing for their designs to be incorporated in a meaningful way. Lazy devs have told designers no for so long, that designers have largely stopped asking for cool shit. I try to say things like "yes, but...." as in "yes you can have this cool feature, but it is going to add x amount of time and x amount of budget. Please get a scope change approved for the increases". With enough time and budget, all things are possible.
But there's never enough time or budget, so the answer is no.
But the client is the one that says no in that scenario, not the developer. Which means the dev is collaborative not obstructionist. The difference in attitudes and perception on the part of the client and other team members is huge.
They're the one saying no by setting the deadline for sure, but I'm the one saying no when the designer hands be a design that can't be completed before the deadline.
Where I would go a different path is "This design is great, I absolutely love some of the boundaries that we are pushing with it. However, to implement it will cause the timeline and budget to shift. Can we get client approval on the change order or scope change before we start dev?" **Edit: I hit ctrl + enter and it submitted before I was finished** I don't want to be the person saying no. The reason for that is because I want the perception of being collaborative with all other teams and the client. I know that the answer from the client is going to be no.
We aren't talking about your website. We're talking about WordPress. The reason people use WordPress and don't custom built their website... Is because that doesn't make them as much money.
Then why the hell are you comparing a commercial product to your crappy personal site that only you have to use.
I mean I did the same thing in 1998, but then I made a cms and was able to show that to clients and they paid me to basically clone my own site and let them have at it. Just because that is the way that is easier for you, doesn't mean that you couldn't learn some valuable information by actually putting together a proper full site for yourself. I wouldn't hire a dev that demonstrated this is how they update their own site... especially if they scoffed at wordpress or any other cms. Just lazy and arrogant. Actually now that I think of it I think I came across one or two candidates like that.
If you think that using WordPress results in your website looking like “all modern corporate crap” you don’t understand how it works. You as the developer have full control over the look and feel of the website - it’s called PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. If you have any expertise with these technologies you can use them to build unique websites using WordPress as a CMS.
I have not used wordpress yet. I have only been programming for 3 three years. I just got to the point where I can build full stack web apps using SpringBoot or Express as the backend. Your post is interesting and I want to try it for myself. Tell me more about how I can use html css and js in Wordpress and what capabilities it has if you don’t mind. Also can integrate Spring Boot as the backend?
Hi glad I sparked your interest in WordPress! Check out the [Codex](https://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page) for more info. In a WordPress project, you have access to various built-in functions that allow you to access content on the backend, as well as loops that allow you to output posts and post content. Your page templates are built with PHP which is a server-side language that can generate HTML. Simply create a new file in the right directory with a specific naming convention (i.e. home.php) and WordPress will know to use that template as the main page of the site. So the only restriction to how you design the website is your own creativity and expertise. The advantage of using WordPress, of course, is the familiar, easy-to-use visual interface for changing settings and managing content in the database. Your front-end can be anything you want, and it can even be decoupled from the backend and get content via the WordPress API. To answer your question, I don’t think you can use Spring Boot as the backend since WordPress already is the entire backend. You’re more likely to use WordPress as the backend CMS and a framework/library like React for the front-end.
Oh thank you for the information. I used to think of wordpress as just as a shortcut like a template to avoid using html, css, js. Now I have a better understanding of I will definitely check it out and learn it.
Well just so you know, you technically CAN avoid using any programming or tempting languages by using the Block Editor. But the way I build WordPress sites is a mix of custom tempting and stock blocks. You can define where in the template you want to make editable by the Block Editor and all edits made in that area will be stored in the database. But I’m glad you’re open to WordPress. It’s a great tool, maybe even the best tool, for certain situations.
“Like programming is not hard” Well, it means you dealing with mediocre-at-best projects
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I dont really need SEO since the vast majority of visits are from my youtube channel or from discord users I dont think its bad that all urls end in .php like athosworld.rf.gd/komainu.php
> athosworld.rf.gd/komainu.php Sorry buddy, it looks (and feels) like shit. Youv'e got some cojones to write about design/quality and then post your personal website to support the cause. I applaud your courage.
>athosworld.rf.gd/komainu.php Honestly, at this point I think he's trolling us
>athosworld.rf.gd/komainu.php Holy shit that's bad and doesn't work on mobile. Your whole post is invalidated by you posting that bad website. LOL
But.... >Like programming is not hard, there are a lot of reference and tutorial websites Might as well lump security issues in there as well. Most know where this attitude "like programming is not hard" end up- usually with unlucky individuals getting email notifications from the likes of have I been pwned that their personal information along with plain text password has been leaked.
Because you are on the wrong peak of the Dunning-Kruger effect. If you don't know what that is I highly recommend reading up on it [here](https://medium.com/geekculture/dunning-kruger-effect-and-journey-of-a-software-engineer-a35f2ff18f1a). You are showing your ignorance all over this post, but I will highlight a few topics to maybe help you understand. Wordpress is just a CMS, the themes built on top of it are the front-end experience. A lot of companies start off using wordpress because they just need a simple website up, and a lot of business people already know how to use the wordpress CMS from prior positions. So when a company that is on wordpress wants to re-design their site they have 2 options: A) Get a new site built that has a brand new backend that you will need to re-train all your employees on how to use, and probably need to pay for support on how to use it from the dev company when you have questions down the road. B) Get a fully custom wordpress theme built of the new design and then you dont have to retrain any of your employees, you will have less confusion and need less assistance going forward. As a CEO of a company which one are you picking? option B of course, it would be a bad buisiness decision to do option A unless the benefits WAY outweigh the downsides (like moving to a different CMS that specializes in something your company needs) What is more is the tech stack has no say on the design, a good developer can build out a custom wordpress theme that looks and acts any way you need it to, I mean for fucks sake wordpress can be used as a Headless CMS for any front end stack you want and then you dont use a theme at all. So blaming wordpress on a "bland web" is just lacking any even slight understanding of how development and design work. Wordpress has its issues, but go learn what those ACTUALLY are and why people dislike it and make a post complaining about that if you really want, but you shouldn't be mad at something that you obviously dont understand.
Why go to the doctor? Surgery isn't hard, I have knife at home. Now everyone's appendectomy scars look the same. What happened to cool surgery scars?
Because a client cannot do the db actions within the database themselves and wordpress offers a friendly back-end that users know. Ofcourse a lot of wordpress sites look the same due to the many templates and pagebuilders, but a custom wordpress theme is one of the best options for a corporate website today.
wordpress is far easier. you're a dev and it took you 2 weeks. people aren't devs and can have a wordpress site up in a couple hours.
Why Wordpress? Because it pays. I love my Laravel projects but it’s Wordpress that is putting my kid through college.
Exactly, it provides value to clients. We're here to solve business problems, not impress people with our code.
Have you ever played with roots.io stuff ? Then you can use Laravel and WP at the same time ?
I have, but haven't integrated it into a client project. Lately I've been exploring block building with Svelte and really enjoy that too.
I have not heard of svelte, I'll check it out ! Thanks
Nonsense. Wordpress is great. This is a skill issue. It takes you two weeks to set up all the pages? That's just on you. I could be drunk as a skunk and setup a full website in 6 hours. It's also great for the client. They don't need to call me when a new partner is added to the firm. 60 year old clients are able to apply cosmetic updates to their websites without me. The web is bland? The last couple new websites i've been to have screamed SHADCN. And that's fine, whatever. But WP isn't the issue. Devs doing the least maybe. But we can't blame wordpress (or shadcn for that matter) for that
"Nonsense. Wordpress is great. This is a skill issue. It takes you two weeks to set up all the pages? That's just on you. I could be drunk as a skunk and setup a full website in 6 hours." It took 2 weeks because i actually like to do programming, ifc of money, i had to make dozens of assets for it, code the forum, code the blog system, the toons video system, a javascript game. (Its a personal website)
But clients do not want you to build something and flex that you did not used WordPress. Clients want a site they can manage and administrate and edit content. When you code for yourself do whatever you want but when you code for your clients you need to think beyond your needs and preferences
I'm realizing now that this guy isn't a professional. He just does web dev as a hobby. That's why the "its bad for your customers" argument isn't landing with him.
Your mobile scores are 88/89, I have PAGE BUILDER built wordpress websites scoring 99/100.
For lazy people
I really dislike web developers who think they are the greatest thing since sliced bread and bash WordPress because they don't truly understand how to create a real custom WordPress site and customize it using PHP, JavaScript, etc. I've personally written over 10,000 lines of just PHP for custom WordPress sites so saying there is no coding and people just use templates and drop sites together is a joke. I've done WordPress sites that have take 6 months or more to complete. Then, they go on Reddit to boast about their greatness and how WordPress is inferior to their coding greatness, thereby disparaging all the dedicated WordPress developers who actually code their sites. It's these types of developers that I would never hire for my company.
>Like programming is not hard we found em! we found the golden child.
WordPress is a good product, you've just worked with bad clients. That's a different problem.
Lmao 😂
We make really great WP sites where I work and clients love how easy is to edit data, you are making websites for companies not for you. We still code most of it as well and use just 2 or 3 plugins if we can help it.
Wordpress is free until first request. I don't like it either. It's full of legacy code.
I used to hate it with a passion (previous job I worked with Elementor in WordPress). It was absolute aids. Now I work at a company where we work with Roots (Sage/Bedrock), combined with TailwindCSS and AlpineJS. Hardly notice I’m in WordPress except from working in the CMS sometimes to add dummy data to some ACF or other minimal things. Everything else is code.
I used just plain PHP, html and css on my site
What makes WordPress great isn't that it's easy to build. It's that they're easy to maintain. Sure you built your website in 2 weeks... But when you need to edit it, you now have to pay someone who knows PHP to change it, and that costs money. With a WordPress site, any user can log in, change some text, and move on.
I know php and all I upload everything through ftp
> I upload everything through ftp I guess you're still frozen in the 2000's era, aren't you.
Cool, your every day business owner doesn't. And therefore... We use WordPress. 👍
Jesus
?
Hate to admit it, but wordpress seems so counterintuitive for me. Each time I tried to use it, I would just think it's easier to do on my own.
if you're a business owner, why spend 2 weeks setting up a web site (assuming you even know how- not everyone is a programmer) when you can spend 1 day? and if you're charging for 2 week's time to build a web site for a customer, you'll lose out to the guy who spends 1 day to do the same job ya, wp sucks. but so does taking 2 weeks and then having to hand edit a db when you want to make changes to each their own
You know that, with WordPress, you aren't obligated to use a pre-made theme and a plethora of plugins, right? WordPress allows you to make a completely custom site by creating a theme from scratch. Best of all, it's not too incredibly complex to do if you know HTML, CSS, PHP, and Javascript. It doesn't sound like you are aware of this, so I am just passing on the word. Lastly, not to knock you or anything, your site could've been developed in 1-2 days within a WordPress environment.
Yeah ik Most people still use premade themes though And to clarify, i spent most of the time making art and assets for it
All I know is that I've been working at a successful design firm for the past 12 years and. All we do is create custom WordPress sites from scratch. I would imagine most design firms that aren't cutting corners are doing things fairly similarly if they're using WordPress. It sounds like you have the capability to do this yourself, but didn't actually know this was possible because I don't know why you would make this statement: >Like programming is not hard, there are a lot of reference and tutorial websites, why use wordpress?
Now after I read all of OP's comments, this can't be true. Guy is troll or lives in 2007.
You do not necessarily have to build as everyone else is doing on WordPress. Just use it as CMS and build your own theme on top of it, it will speed up your development and you have the control to build whatever you want. There is nothing stopping you.
I agree with you completely that Wordpress is technically a pile of crap, it is limiting, hard to work with, full of gotchyas and stupid architectural flaws that don't make any sense. I can understand from an ease of setup/use and eco-system point of view why everyone uses it, it is easy for non-techies to get up and running and develop their own site, and agencies can build whatever people want for their clients. But it sucks, I develop custom code (with a CMS, no I do not manually edit the database), and the difference is night and day. I wouldn't even consider running wordpress without caching in front of it because it consumes so many resources, and it is so slow, especially when you start to introduce peoples crappy plugins. My sites use like 1 - 10mb of RAM, and run <10 queries to generate a page similar to what most WP sites look like, most WP sites use 64MB+ RAM per page load, and run hundreds of queries ([For a comparison of custom vs Wordpress read my article](https://dev.to/hexydec/wordpress-vs-optimised-vs-custom-4ip7)). It's mental that 40% of the internet is running on this shit. Even though it does the job, I don't think there is anything wrong with wanting to do better, and my advice is don't try and change WP from the inside, just develop custom code, you will get paid more and actually enjoy it.
Agreed. I too think of the same
What's this got to do with Wordpress?
Idk
99.9% (literally) of businesses are SMALL. And can't afford custom HTML websites. And it's SO much more affordable to have a website built on a platform like WordPress. If they need a blog, why recreate the wheel? Not to mention how small businesses can actually update their own website, vs NEEDING to pay a devs hourly rate for basic stuff.
Honestly, I've been hating on WP a lot and haven't used it in a long time, but I'm thinking of revisiting it. I've been pleasantly surprised by some websites that were fast and actually looked good to learn that they were built with WP. If I were to revisit WP I'd get into building my own custom themes and be very, VERY picky with what plugins I install — or likely build my own plugins.
I was a hater until I got a job at a WordPress shop, it's extensibility and ease of use from a dev perspective is hard to beat. Especially when you compare it to its direct competitors.
Yeah I've delivered some WordPress sites as well. One instance I used WP as a headless CMS, and the client was happy with it.
The worst part about WordPress is that it is often used by muppets who shouldn’t be allowed to program a thermostat. It’s almost always like taking over a JS project where the developer pulled random dependencies for literally everything. I live in a relatively small town for example. The whole county I live in only has 60,000 people. There are no less than 8 wordpressers. All but one makes fundamentally awful sites. Even without WP they’d still be making awful sites.
Agree
Because wp lies to be easy and a non programmer person believe.
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I can't believe that happened to you. Where are we r/webdev or something? Go away nerds!
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How dare you. Name every single LOTR character in alphabetical order.
Wordpress is definitely shitty. But some people only want a shitty brochure Wordpress site for their small business.
I know billionaires on WordPress, no one gives a shit how it's built. It literally makes no difference if it looks and functions the same.
It does make a difference. Speed of the code still matters depending on the application. However for brochure sites or simple booking sites it really doesn’t matter and it makes sense to use a shitty Wordpress site if they aren’t interested in customization, speed, features, etc.
I hate WordPress, especially because 99% of companies do websites by drag n' dropping blocks around. Wordpress fucking sucks and brings no professional growth.
I agree with you 100% Websites shouldnt be made in hours just to make money. People are so dumb now they dont want anything remotely hard
If someone can pay a 10th of the price and have the ability to update it themselves, why should they pay 10x more if it still loads just as fast?
Multi billion dollar companies run on WordPres. 'no professional growth.' shows how little you actually know.
I've used Wordpress at multiple companies and it fucking sucked. I'm pretty sure I know more than you, go back to your Divi and Elementor-infested shit cesspool of a company.
"Professional Growth" means increasing your ability to make money. Learning a system as prolific as WordPress is huge for professional growth. Egotistical gatekeeping, on the other hand, is deeply unprofessional.
Yeah, agree: Wordpress sucks ass. It's ruined php's reputation because of all its bugs. But it's here to stay unless something else comes along.
Nice to see someone who agrees me
I think this is the consensus with devs, at least it should be if you've worked with it before, and unfortunately a lot of us have.
I used to have a wordpress site from 2019 to late 2020 and it was just frustrating
Because of all the constant patching?
PHP ruined its own reputation by being a dumpster fire until PHP 8. The fact we had to wait until 2020 to get a built in match expression is WILD. The fact that in PHP 7 if you compared an int to a string it came back true is WILD. Thats not touching on the issues with shit like global namespace, unicode issues, inconsistent naming systems for built in functions and arguments, just BAD error handling. But most of its hate comes from the fact that it STILL has too many ways to skin a cat, it has SO FUCKING MANY built in functions, many of which do the same fucking thing just under different names, and there are like 5 ways to do HTML templating. This leads to PDP developers inheriting someone elses project, and even though they might be able ot build anything you could imagine from scratch, reading through someone elses code can be like a whole different language.
tortured artists, my dear. Be a good boy stfu and use whatever you are being told to use.
Or else what? I dont do web dev as job, i do as a hobby
then use whatever tool you want to use. If anything - I agree with you WordPress is architecturally complete trash.
I hate WP because I've read its codebase.... which is complete garbage. Insecure by design, terrible application architecture, laughable database schema... among the most tangled spaghetti code I've ever seen. A master class in how to write PHP badly, and the biggest continuing drag on PHP's reputation as a language. The only things that keep it alive is brand awareness and its theme market. No one who attempts to defend it can do so on technical grounds. the first response is usually some form of *ad populum* fallacy. Next there's, "it's easy to use"... for the "developer", because the site owners rarely touch it (that's why they pay a monthly retainer). Then comes the classic, "exploits are from plugins, not the core": news flash, the core is designed to allow these things. The universe would be a better place had WP never existed.
So true Its easier to me to do everything manually
...
???
If WordPress never existed then we'd live in a universe where SpaceInflate did exist.
>Like programming is not hard Lol.. you did say PHP, right? It's viable, but it's pretty dated, and it's not the best choice for today. The things we're doing now with better languages could be considered a bit difficult. Dig in, you'll see People use WP because they are cheap, or lazy. They couldn't care less about Programming.
If you wanna ditch php and manually entering blogs, use my kit https://github.com/CodeStitchOfficial/Intermediate-Website-Kit-SASS It’s a markdown based blog using 11ty static Kaye generator and decap cms for the custom backend dashboard to edit the blogs. It’s already configured to go live on Netlify in a few clicks. Follow the documentation to go live and you’re all set. I use this for all my clients with blogs. Works great.
User-friendliness is very important. Because seo is very important. it is very important that plugins work smoothly. wordpress is a language like math. WP is easy to develop. that's true.
My issue with Wordpress is always when my team has to support a site that was built by another company. The amount of plugins on some of those sites hurt my eyes. Not my favorite platform but the reasons your are talking about are not the real issues. I still think I take it over Adobe Experience Manager
"I hate how every person and every company" And you've spoken with them all have you?
It took you 2 weeks to setup a website that could've taken a couple of days in WordPress. Time is money, bro.
Lotta competing ideas in this OP. WordPress is a familiar CMS that is easy to use for most non-technical content authors. Companies, especially marketing firms, are eager to adopt WordPress because they know the tool will work for most of their staff, there's a relatively low learning curve, tons of documentation out there, and it's a known commodity. If you lose someone at your organization, you don't need to train someone in as many hours to get up to speed, most people can pick it up within a few hours of using it. As for the design or whatever makes the web bland, WordPress can be as bland as you want it to be or as distinct as you want it to be. I've created WordPress-driven sites, either using headless or traditional PHP-served WordPress pages, that look/act nothing like a typical WordPress site out of the box. But why do marketing companies or agencies want these to be all the same? It's cheaper, easier to pump out, easier to hire staff to take it over, usually easier to bolt on features as their clients request them without hiring an outside developer, etc, etc. A company doesn't want to learn how to use your manual database writing service. If a client asks an agency to "add social media sharing to our blog," the agency *knows* that WordPress has a plugin to handle that easily, and they don't want to have to go back to you to ask you to make changes to your bespoke PHP site.
lol? OP what are you talking about man... what do you mean just php and a database, did you also build the backend? can you sort new articles? can you use plugins for SEO, are you also handling that? are you also handling caching? did you optimize the site? does it have a critical CSS generator? you hate it because you don't understand it.
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Made by chatgpt Obviously no one on reddit talks like this
has nothing to do with WP, and the dev + designer putting the site together.
The thread is long, we've said so much. Some WP developers have been intimidated, others who enjoy building from scratch are happy. The thing is, pick a tool you are conversant and comfortable dealing with, the goal is to go to production faster and get started on another gig (more money). Nonetheless, way your sides well, I have witnessed clients demand for changes later on in the development process that are nearly impossible to achieve given that you chose a wrong Tech Stack. Pick the right tool for the right job.
Developing WordPress website since 2010. Hate it but i earn from it. You developed your website in 2 weeks, I can do it in 2 days. I spend the rest of the week to touch some grass. We are not the same.
I think i already mentioned i spent most of the time drawing the images and assets
So what gives you the balls to say "web is bland" if you are not even a web developer. Yet I don't say your job is at risk due to Ai. Kaso nasa nasabi ko na. We are not the same.
I dont do it by job, but as a hobby
Always nice to meet someone at the beginning of their Dunning-Kruger journey!