Bonum Certa Men Certa

WordPress is for the 'Old Web'; the New Web Necessitates Static Pages

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 12, 2024,
updated Nov 12, 2024

Electronic cigarette isolated on white Background

WordPress is probably "not good for you" anymore...

Matt Mullenweg
Author: Ronny Siegel

WHEN I started "properly" blogging 20 years and 2 days ago (I called it "Web Log", not "blog") it was not 'too easy' to set up WordPress, as databases needed to be created and populated with users, permissions granted, space allocated, configuration files crafted by hand etc. It was doable, but one had to be fairly technical (or alternatively ask for help/seek assistance from a technical person, who in turn becomes an unpaid "support person" because "shit happens" sometimes).

I now have a blog with over 20 years of posts. The likelihood that any of these posts will change (get edited) is close to 0. So why not static pages? Many people ask themselves the same thing. There are environmental factors to account for. Some people have blogged for about 30 years, depending on how one defines "blog".

WordPress turned 20 last year. Version 0.70 came out on May 27, 2003, only a few months before I started my Ph.D. and a couple of years before I met Mike, the co-founder of WordPress, in a coffee shop across the road from where I had studied. Earlier on I said WordPress is sort of obsolete by now. It's bloated (not what I installed way back in 2004), it's a pain to maintain (patching is only part of the burden), and is unsuitable for today's Web because a growing majority of Web traffic is a nuisance (bots). Today for example our server serviced about 1.3 million Web requests, but we estimate that the majority of these requests did not come from people. Thankfully, however, everything is static now, so we only pay - in the payload sense - with traffic, not CPU or RAM (or barely any of the latter).

It still seems like a lot of people (or sites) move away from WordPress, and that decision of theirs barely has anything to do with WordPress blunders/disputes/lawsuits, nor does that have anything to do with WordPress.com selling people's work to plagiarisers (under the guise of "AI"). There are purely practical reasons to move away from WordPress and the likes of it.

WordPress isn't a project that I dislike; I devoted years of my life helping WordPress as a Free software project. But knowing the project and its current chief (and his history) well enough helps make an informed choice (and commentary) about it. The problem isn't Matt; the problem is the way the project evolved, resulting in protests from within (for instance, the GUI changes). This closely relates to a broader conundrum in software development; if things keep growing and growing (like Linux), how can quality, security, resource minimalism etc. be maintained? There's a kind of inflection point where the cost of staying with bloat becomes higher than the cost of losing some desirable features and moving to something similarly functional, more bare-bones though.

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