Category: WordPress

I’m going to step away from my role as Marketing Lead. I consider this mostly a personal failure, both in correctly setting and getting expectations and in fitting into another type of organization. Matt and I have talked this through and there are no hard feelings on either side whatsoever. At the same time I’m sad about not having been able to leave more of a mark. Let me explain why I’m stepping down.

When I first talked to Matt about this role he asked me to become “the CMO of WordPress”. In my eyes, a CMO is involved in all aspects of a project / company. When I was announced, I was announced as a “change in WordPress leadership”. My experience over the last few months made me feel that while I was doing things and getting things done, I certainly wasn’t leadership. Which is why I want to step away from my role: I don’t want to pretend I have a say in things I don’t have a say in.

What is marketing?

It seems the problem of defining of what marketing is beforehand, is one of the problems of why I failed in my role. Marketing to me is not just the last step of “promotion”, but the entire process of bringing a product to market. It’s clear that others within the WordPress project don’t necessarily see it like that, and when they describe marketing, it’s a lot more like what I would call advertising. A lot more tactical. I don’t dislike that tactical work, but I think my qualities lie elsewhere.

There’s a stark difference between where I thought I would be in the organization in this role, and where I am actually finding myself now. Even things that every outsider would consider marketing (release posts, about pages) are created without even so much as talking to me or others in the marketing team. Because I felt left out of all these decisions, I feel I can’t be a marketing lead.

Clarity about my position

My position is unclear, not just to me, but to many people which makes me uncomfortable. I’ve been asked dozens of times on Twitter, Facebook and at WordCamps why I now work for Automattic, which of course I don’t but that is the perception for a lot of people. On other occasions I seem to be the token non-Automattician, which I’m also uncomfortable with.

At the same time I feel hampered by my WordPress position to do the work I need to do at Yoast. I notice I’m sometimes shutting up about things Yoast does because that would look weird on the outside and could be perceived wrong. I also felt I was “defending” WordPress too much, on stuff I had otherwise perhaps been more critical of.

WordPress mission and vision

I am used to having a strong vision and mission for a company and a product, and to be translating that into product & marketing decisions. Matt has certainly shown some of his product vision in State of the Words over the year but I’ve found it very hard to get more of the vision behind all the recent changes and the roadmap “out there”.

I’ve not encountered (or been brought into) any discussions about our product vision, something I would need to translate into day-to-day actions. I was expecting there to be some backchannels where these discussions were had and these decisions were made, turns out these simply don’t exist. Matt takes his input from core devchats and lots of other chats and then decides what the roadmap should look like. I honestly think that process needs opening up, even though I do appreciate that Matt has so far been pretty good at bringing the product forward.

An inevitable conclusion

Combined, this doesn’t work for me. I was expecting to be actively involved in larger product and marketing decisions. That didn’t happen. At the same time I have to explain what we do to the outside world and to other people within the WordPress ecosystem, because they assume I know and I’ve been involved. I’m unwilling and unable to do that.

I think some of these things need to change. I see the value in what Josepha is doing and also in projects like the governance project, but these processes take time and patience, and patience is a virtue I’ve not developed well. This was my way of trying to broaden WordPress leadership. I’m sad to conclude that I failed. I’m of course still available to advise and strategize should the project want for that, and will give my opinion, whether I’m asked to or not 😉

Turns out failing burns me out faster than going fast does… That’s why I’m taking an extended holiday this summer, after which I’ll focus my work time for 100% on Yoast and my Chief Product Officer role there. In that role, and outside of it, I’ll absolutely still be an active voice and contributor in the WordPress community.

Photo by Ugne Vasyliute on Unsplash

I’ve had the question a few times now of what I’ve been up to since I got appointed lead marketing for WordPress. The first few weeks have been busy, but very interesting. The marketing team is doing a lot of things. I won’t go over all of them here, but wanted to show some of the projects we’ve worked on and how the processes around them work. As you’ll see, most of my focus so far has been on WordPress.org itself and team processes.

Quick wins

During the first weeks one of the things I started working on were some quick wins: making some of our about pages more reflective of the current state of the project. We:

• updated the roadmap page (actually a couple of times already, most recently after the 5.1 release);
• removed mentions of jQuery and other libraries from the features page and added a lot of links to the support pages to it;
• fixed the testimonials page as it was broken;
• and finally: started working on a better history page.

Showcase

One of the things that immediately became clear as I was talking to the marketing team is that the showcase needs an update. The marketing team has been publishing great WordPress case studies on the make marketing blog, but those deserve a better place. At the same time the Showcase, where this content would make a lot of sense, obviously needs more love.

When I proposed changing the showcase I got an immediate enthusiastic response from quite a few people, which was very warming. Pragmatic offered to help with design time and has been hard at work based on my (admittedly very simple) outline, leading to some very cool first designs. In the last meeting of the WordPress design team we’ve been discussing their first designs and based on the feedback that came from that, we’ll iterate on those designs a bit more.

This process has already showed me what an enormous ecosystem we have. Let me show you: in this case the marketing team comes up with a plan. The design team, at our request, starts thinking about a design, someone steps up and starts designing, on which the entire design team gives feedback, along with marketing and the accessibility team. Once we’ve agreed on a design, the meta team will start implementing the changes, after which I’m guessing the accessibility and marketing team will once again review the result. At the same time other members of the marketing team are coming up with a process for what a showcase entry will now require and how to get all that data. WordPress really is a huge organization.

Team processes

We’ve made some small adjustments to the team’s processes and I’m certain more will follow. The team’s Trello board is very useful for smaller tasks, but for bigger tasks like the Showcase redesign, we really need to figure out how we can do that more efficiently together with other teams. This is something that I’m hoping (and honestly, expecting) Josepha Haden, the new executive director for WordPress, will help us improve on.

SEO

Last year, as one of the actions leading from the growth council I was part of, Jono Alderson and I did an SEO analysis of WordPress.org (Jono really did the bulk of the initial analysis). Over the last few months we’ve been creating meta tickets to fix those issues one by one. The meta team (the team that handles all things WordPress.org) has been hard at work fixing these, leading to 55 closed tickets at the current count and 19 open ones.

Google Search Console is showing us that errors are going down. It’s also showing a small uptick in traffic that could probably be attributed to these improvements. I expect this is a sign of things to come, as I truly think we can get more traffic to WordPress.org.

Analytics

As we’re working on SEO, Jono and I are also slowly improving the Google Analytics implementation. Using Google Tag Manager we’ve started improving our measurement, for instance by tagging more events. This means we can better track events like downloads, thread creation and replies on the forums and other events.

We have already had the first few requests for analytics data from the Docs and Support teams, who want to use that data to improve their pages. It’s been very nice to quickly be able to answer those as our data gets better.

Is that all?

No, not even close. There is some very exciting work being done by the team on social media campaigns for WordCamps, something I hope we can build and expand on in the future. Another project is the promotion of sustainability for WordCamps. yet another one is the ongoing promotion of WordPress.tv stuff (which probably also deserves a more prominent spot on WordPress.org). There’s also work being done on the mobile page on .org, we’ve started discussing what should happen to the Gutenberg page, and I’m probably still forgetting tons of things as there is so much.

What’s next?

A lot of the above is ongoing work that we’ll have to work on for at least a few more months. At the same time, as I now understand our challenges a bit better, I want to take a step back and produce a “meta view” of how I think we should be marketing WordPress. This marketing plan will then serve as a discussion starter for the marketing team, but I certainly hope also across a wider part of the community.

It’s been very exciting to see what people in the marketing team are capable of. I hope to be able to shine more light on what they do and also to amplify the reach of what they do in the coming months. Combined with my own experience, I look forward to making a meaningful difference in WordPress’ growth.

As I’m getting into my new role as Marketing Lead for WordPress, I was doing an analysis of the CMS market share numbers. The first thing I noticed was that, according to W3Techs, WordPress’s market share had yet again grown, to now have 33% of the top 10 million sites. As I was diving deeper, the numbers in the W3Techs research show some very interesting trends. I thought I’d share what I’m seeing.

WordPress’s market share is huge

The first thing that’s obvious when you look at these numbers is that WordPress’s market share is absolutely huge. At 33% it’s now 11 times bigger than the number two in the market, another open source CMS: Joomla. I’ll be very happy when we add another .3% and can say that we’re “a third of the internet”.

When you look at the raw numbers, it’s clear that only a few of the CMSs are making any real moves. I’ve highlighted the growth and decline per month over the last year in the screenshot below.

Note that the “None” group in this data, with 45% market share, doesn’t mean that 45% of sites are coded by hand. It means that W3Techs did not recognize the CMS (and it recognizes a lot of them), and the CMS is thus probably bespoke. The trends are very consistent though: people are moving to known CMSs and very few CMSs grow one month to decline the next. You’re either growing, or shrinking, with very little exception.

Relative growth and trends

Because WordPress is so big, looking at absolute growth only tells you so much. If we start looking at relative growth, we can see who our new competitors really are. As soon as you start looking at relative growth for the top 20, three systems jump out:

• Squarespace, which grew 114%.
• Wix, which grew 150%.
• Weebly, which grew 120%.

It’s noteworthy that Prestashop, an eCommerce system / CMS, also grew its market share by a very respectable 67%. WordPress grew by “only” 13%, which considering the marketshare it already has, is still massive. But what I was looking for was in the next step: what if all these systems maintained the growth or decline they had in 2018 for another year? If they do, the top 10 of CMSs would look starkly different to today:

While WordPress will remain number 1, the rest of the top 10 will change dramatically.

Open source on the decline?

At the beginning of 2018, the top 4 CMSs by market share in the world were all open source: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Magento. So I also dove in and checked whether Open Source as a whole was losing or winning. The numbers are clear, based on the top 25 CMSs (including all the sites that fit in W3Techs “None” category, classified as closed source):

On the whole, Open Source marketshare is growing, but really only because of WordPress and a tiny bit of help from Prestashop. I think this is worrying. We’re losing diversity in the CMS market and with it we’re losing open source alternatives.

Financial ramifications

Consider this:

• Shopify expects to do about 1 billion USD in revenue in 2018, with 1.5% marketshare.
• Wix expects to do about 600 million USD in revenue in 2018, with 1% marketshare.
• Squarespace reportedly had 300 million USD in revenue in 2017, when it was still much smaller.

I think it’s not unfair to extrapolate these numbers for theses CMSs and compare them to WordPress’s 33% market share. If we do that then WordPress as a whole is indeed, as Matt said in his State of the Word, a $10 billion industry. In fact when he says that he might even be on the low side.

There’s one difference which we may need to address though: WordPress doesn’t spend a percentage of that $10 billion on marketing. The CMSs that are growing their market share so aggressively are spending a lot of money on marketing, and it’s clear that it’s working. It’s not a problem yet, but we’ll need to be more creative and keep an eye on this.

CMS Market Share Data

I imported all this CMS market share data from W3Techs into a Google Sheet. The sheet, including some of my highlights and forecasts is public and you can view it here. I’d love to hear what else you see that strikes as odd or needs attention.

I just came back from WordCamp US in Nashville, which was awesome. In this post I want to address some of the questions I’ve had a couple of times. So here we go:

Have more questions for me? Drop them in the comments, I’ll answer them there!

For the last few months, the WordPress developer community has been moving towards a release of WordPress 5.0. This is the highly anticipated release that will contain the new Gutenberg editing experience. It’s arguably one of the biggest leaps forward in WordPress’ editing experience and its developer experience in this decade. It’s also not done yet, and if we keep striving for its planned November 19th release date, we are setting ourselves up for failure.

Update November 9th: WordPress 5.0 has been moved
The new release date is November 27th, 2018. See the Make/Core post for details. While I’m happy that it’s been postponed, I’m not sure whether this is enough to get WordPress 5.0 to be as accessible and stable as I think it should be. Time will tell, I guess.

Let me begin by stating that I love Gutenberg. It’s the best thing since sliced bread as far as content editing is concerned. I’m writing this post in Gutenberg. I started writing it on my iPhone. It rocks. But it also still has numerous bugs. In fact, the editor broke on me during writing this post and failed to autosave all the contents. Luckily I saw it breaking and copied the paragraphs to an external editor.

Reasons for delaying

There are a two main reasons why the November 19th timeline is in my opinion untenable:

• There are some severe accessibility concerns. While these aren’t new and a few people are working hard on them, I actually think we can get a better handle on fixing them if we push the release back. Right now it looks to me as though keyboard accessibility has regressed in the last few releases of Gutenberg.
• The most important reason: the overall stability of the project isn’t where it needs to be yet. There are so many open issues for the 5.0 milestone that even fixing all the blockers before we’d get to Release Candidate stage next week is going to prove impossible. We have, at time of writing 212 untriaged bugs and 165 issues on the WordPress 5.0 milestone.

People are working hard

The amount of work being done every day right now by the development team is bordering on the insane. Look at the work for the last three days:

I’d normally be happy with this for a week. This is 3 days, also including a Sunday. It’s been like this for a while. I appreciate all these people doing the hard work, but moving this fast only increases the chance of regressions.

When I mentioned earlier today in the WordPress Slack’s #core-editor channel that I think we should push back, the response was pretty positive:

Let’s get this straight: this is in the channel with a large part of the people working on this release. I’m not the first to say this. I hope this post will help the powers that be come to the same conclusion.

Conclusion: push back, and zoom out

All these things considering, my conclusion is simple: we need to push back the release. My preference would be to January. This would allow us to zoom out a bit, prevent regressions and overall, lead to a better product, with finished documentation. Something that’s worthy of the label RC when we decide to stick that on it. Right now, I feel that the beta is more of an alpha, and we’ll end up with an RC that’s more of a beta.

 “Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.”

Allen Ginsberg, from Ginsberg, a biography