Re: WP Product Talk about the question on if WordPress market share is declining. I think this is a great discussion, and I’m glad it’s happening.

The long and short of that conversation was that it’s not declining, it’s stagnating, and there are definitely a few things that people are concerned about. There was some discussion around different ways that we could potentially solve that problem. It was a great discussion, and I strongly encourage you to check it out.

I feel like we’re kind of missing the point in the conversation in a lot of ways because we’re so focused on the product and the features, what WordPress can do, and how it compares to our competitors. All this stuff makes me feel like we’re missing what the ethos of WordPress was, where it originally came from, and how we got here in the first place.

The conversation tends to drift towards, “What can we do to make WordPress more competitive?” or “How can we add more features to WordPress to make it better?” And I think that’s fine, but I feel like the larger question is, “What can we do to make WordPress continue to resonate with the community that it’s supposed to serve?”

WordPress has always been about giving people a voice and giving them the ability to share their thoughts and their ideas with the world, regardless of their technical expertise. That’s the mission. That’s the ethos. And I think sometimes we lose sight of that when we start focusing so much on the product and not on the people that it’s supposed to serve.

So, my challenge to anyone who is working in the WordPress space, or anyone who’s thinking about where WordPress is going, is to think about why people are using WordPress in the first-place. Think about how we can make WordPress continue to be a tool that empowers people to share their voices, their thoughts, and their ideas with the world.

WordPress Is Not a Blogging Platform.

It’s not a blogging platform. It’s not a CMS. It’s much more than that, and you know it. That’s why people struggle with answering this question.

To me, WordPress is:

• The hope to be a little more independent.
• The wish to be free from a mega corporation’s social media algorithm.
• The dream of not being beholden to the whims of their job.
• It’s the hope of a better future for themselves.

This is why you always hear someone mutter “It’s the community” (which I’d argue even that isn’t quite right), because they know it’s not the software that people are buying into. Nobody wakes up and says “Man, I wish I could manage my blog content easier” and then discover WordPress afterward.

No, they start with a need that has absolutely nothing to do with WordPress.

1. They just lost their job and they’re trying to figure out how to get their name out there
2. They want to make a product and sell it online
3. They want a safe place to talk about sensitive topics that social media tends to block
4. They want to journal, and let out how they feel about something that’s going on in their life.
5. They want to share an exciting journey they’re taking with the world

To me, these are examples of the things that WordPress offer. how we go about that isn’t as important as the why, and yet we find ourselves spending so much time talking about how WordPress works.

Then at the same time, we’re observing that people aren’t excited about WordPress, and wondering why.

I think it’s because we’re not talking about things they’re excited about. Features don’t excite people, the things those features can do for them is what excite people.

We should take a lesson from Simon Sinek, start with why, and really spend some time reflecting on how we can get back to that purpose. When I first jumped into WordPress, the problem of not having a job, or needing to freelance, or to grow my business, or any of those things didn’t start with me saying “man, I wish I had a WordPress blog”. The conversation started with “I need to find freelance clients, how can I do that”.

WordPress just so happened to be a key piece of that equation in the conversations and in my research at the time, and I think that maybe it’s not as big of a part of that conversation now. If we want to see WordPress avoid declining, we need to figure out why we’re not a part of that conversation, and get a grasp on how we can be once again.