WordPress released the results of its annual user and developer survey that showed mixed feelings about the direction the software is going and a growing sense of not being welcome in the global WordPress community.
Gutenberg’s publisher
Gutenberg is the modernized version of the default site editor that brings the paradigm of a visual editor to the core of WordPress.
Third-party visual WordPress editors have revolutionized the process of building websites with WordPress, making it relatively easy to create websites with intuitive interfaces.
This was the goal of Gutenberg, which introduced the full site editor in 2022. The WordPress core development team has spent the last two years making incremental improvements to the user interface to make it more intuitive and add more features.
What was reflected in the 2023 annual survey, especially in contrast to the previous year, is a sense that users feel less confident in Gutenberg, even though more publishers are using Gutenberg now than at any other time.
What editor are you using?
Question nine tracks the percentage of users adopting Gutenberg, showing a steady increase in users from 37% in 2020 to 60% in 2023.
But according to responses to question 10 that asks if WordPress meets their needs, 29% disagree that WordPress meets their needs, and less than half of users (45%) agreed that WordPress meets their needs. 26% of respondents answered that they were neutral.
These results mean that 55% of WordPress users did not respond that WordPress meets their needs. This was the first year the question was asked, so there’s no data to show whether this is an increase or decrease, but it’s still an underwhelming result.
Fewer users think WordPress is as good as others
Question no. 19 asked if WordPress was as good or better than other site builders and content management systems.
In 2022, 68% of users agreed that WordPress was as good or better. This figure was reduced to 63% in 2023.
The number of users who disagreed that WordPress is as good or better increased from 9% in 2022 to 13% in 2023, and the number of neutral people increased from 1% to 24% of respondents.
This means that in 2023 37% of WordPress users who responded to the survey disagreed with the statement that WordPress is as good or better, an increase of five percentage points from the previous year.
Clearly, the results on how users feel about Gutenberg and WordPress in general indicate that users are losing trust in WordPress.
This answer must surely be a disappointment to the core development team because the 2023 version of Gutenberg is really more intuitive to use than it has ever been, WordPress performance scores are also at an all-time high.
So what’s going on, why are user satisfaction signals trending downward?
Why user satisfaction is trending downward
A clue as to why user happiness and trust in WordPress is trending downward may have something to do with users looking over the fence at the Wix and Duda platforms that have significantly better performance scores and they are also easier to create websites.
On the other side of the fence are third-party website builders (like Brick builder, Breakdance website builderi Elementor) and WordPress hosts (Bluehost) that offer an unquestionably superior website building experience for developers who need advanced flexibility and users who don’t know how to code.
Perhaps a clue as to why user satisfaction is falling can be found in the answers to question 20, which asks what are the three best things about WordPress.
The biggest declines were for:
Ease of use Flexibility Cost block themes
Ease of use
In 2022, 32% of users cited ease of use as one of the top three things about WordPress. In 2023 this figure dropped to 21.7%
flexibility
Flexibility was ranked 31% in 2022, but in 2023 this ranking dropped to 18.5%.
cost
In 2022, 37% of users cited cost as one of the best things, but in 2023 that number dropped to 17%.
blog topics
Blog topics went from 10% citing blog topics as one of the top three things to just 5.3% in 2023.
Users don’t feel it for WordPress and this lack of “feels” is reflected in the market share statistics reported by W3Techs which indicate a negative two-year downward trend in market share.
Market share fell from 43.3% in 2022 (quoted in an article by Joost deValk) and (according to W3Techs) fell further to 43.2% in February 2023 and from there fell further to 43.1% in February 2024.
Wix usage increased from 2.5% in February 2023 to 2.6% in 2024. Shopify increased from 3.8% in 2023 to 4.3% in 2023.
Joost deValk, co-founder of Yoast SEO, raised the alarm in 2022 when he noted that WordPress’ market share was shrinking, pointing to the slow pace of performance improvements and the difficulty of using WordPress as two main reasons for the reduction in market share.
The article written by Joost explained:
“WordPress has a performance team now and has made progress. But the reality is that it hasn’t made great strides yet… I think WordPress, for the first time in a decade, is ‘innovating’.”
What frustrates WordPress users
Another clue to why WordPress users are increasingly expressing dissatisfaction is what frustrates them most about WordPress, noted in question 21, where respondents were asked to pick the three most frustrating things.
The response of “too many plugins (find the right one)” saw a 133% change, with 8% citing too many plugins in 2022 and 18.6% in 2023.
Site editing experience (17%), security (16.4%) and performance (16.2%) were the top sources of frustration with WordPress.
One bright spot is that the number of respondents who were frustrated that site editing is difficult to learn dropped from 26% in 2022 to 15% in 2023.
These responses were echoed in question 25 which asked which three areas of WordPress need the most attention.
Here are the top five areas that users say need more attention:
Performance 19% Security 18% Developer resources (examples, demos, docs, tutorials, etc.) 16% Design/UI 14% Basic functionality/stability 13%
The future of WordPress
WordPress found itself at a crossroads two years ago in terms of site performance and they took steps to address these issues. But their competitors are “out-innovating” them by improving at a faster rate, not only in site speed, but also in ease of use, SEO and features.
The results of this survey provide clear direction to the WordPress community that has a track record of responding to user needs. Part of the solution is to recognize search marketing communities, affiliates and publications that are influential but not recognized in annual surveys.
When I saw the survey last year, I provided feedback to the core development team on question number five which asked how respondents used WordPress.
These were the options:
A personal project or passion A service offering for my clients A platform to run my business A website for my company or workplace School or academics or research None of the above
What was missing were the categories of content publishing, affiliate marketing, recipe bloggers and local businesses.
Lumping Disney-like WordPress users with family restaurants and recipe bloggers into the “platform to run my business” category is unhelpful and provides little useful information. This oversight feeds the perception that WordPress is out of touch with the millions of users the survey seeks to understand.
The good news is that WordPress is not far away. The survey provides feedback on how the publishing community feels. My email conversations with members of the core development team make it clear that they are willing to embrace all of their users as part of the larger WordPress community.
Read the WordPress poll summary:
2023 Annual Survey Results and Next Steps
Download the PDF version with more details:
WordPress Annual Survey Report 2023
Featured image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
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