Joost de Valk and WPTavern recently reported that according to W3Techs WordPress market share is shrinking for the first time in all its whole life.
What does that mean for the average Joe?
It means that the company powering 43% of the web according Kinsta is now starting to lose some customers. Other companies might gain these customers for themselves.
Scary, right?
People seem to all agree that the increasing complexity of the editing experience, the Full Site Editing feature still unfinished and the lack of focus on performance are to be blamed for this.
Partly I agree that the culprit could be WordPress itself, partly I think somehow the market is changing and finding fullfilment elsewhere.
I also feel it is too soon to try and define a reason for the shrinkage from a statistical point of view, it’s just starting to happen, it’s too soon to conduct a proper market research on the trends leading to this.
Before reaching the next point… a little aside to help you decide which is best for you between ClassicPress and WordPress.
What does that mean to ClassicPress project?
This is a legit question, being that ClassicPress is a fork of WordPress 4.9 series.
It was founded by Scott Bowler in late August 2018, to cater to the needs of all the people that were not in agreement with moving the block editor forward to core.
Despite it’s huge competitors it remained afloat till today, powered by a thriving small community of people.
Even if the plugin and theme ecosystem is not yet fully developed, ClassicPress is by far the most viable alternative to WordPress, without losing the WordPress feel.
It’s interesting to think that WordPress market loss could be ClassicPress gain.
But, wait… is that possible?
Attitude towards the project range among the following:
- Total disinterest.
- Negative opinion.
- It’s interesting, but it’s doomed to fail because WordPress.
- It’s a community powered by WordPress traitors and I hate all of it.
- Enthusiasts and early adopters.
- Curious people just wanting to sneak a peek.
- Waiting to see what happens.
- Developpers wanting to help.
The question that everyone in the community is pondering now is:
Is ClassicPress going to profit from WordPress’s market loss or is this loss not relevant for the project?
I think that ClassicPress is just starting to differenciate from WordPress, that without big marketing efforts it was able to gain a small but thriving user base and that many things are also worked on behind the scenes to make it better.
To raise to this challenge ClassicPress has to make an effort to market itself better, not just a diminuitive version of WordPress but as a stable and fully fledged CMS.
As of now it appears that other solutions are gaining traction, and this demonstrates that while WordPress is ClassicPress direct competitor, ClassicPress has to be very aware that the other solutions are competitors too.