Choosing WordPress is much more meaningful than most think.

Before I explain why let me share some thoughts about WordPress’ new editor — Gutenberg. If you don’t know what that is, well, you’re in a good place; you’ve missed all the commotion leading up to it and the anti-climax thereafter.

The WordPress community seems to be split between those embracing the new editor and ones rejecting it. From a product perspective, a lot of the criticism is warranted. Classic Editor saved the day for many (eg. developers ans their portfolios of Gutenberg-incompatible websites).

I certainly would have preferred to see accessibility being recognised as a priority much earlier in the development cycle. In the end, though, there was no Y2K-like apocalypse. Here at WP Hosting we only had to handle a couple of Gutenberg issues/questions in our support queue.

I also think that a lot of the yaysayers — and I would consider myself part of that group too — embraced the vision as much as the product, buying into the idea that Gutenberg brings a new paradigm for content creation. WordPress needs to innovate to remain relevant for many more years to come.

Jeff Chandler of WP Tavern was spot on in a podcast earlier this month:

WordPress is now, officially, on a new journey. On a new road.

For me (wearing my content marketer hat) this means much more flexibility. Content will be built of clusters of blocks that will be just as meaningful individually, allowing us to be much more granular in our distribution across different platforms and channels. Data will allow us to optimise the ‘block-stack’ and deliver better experiences, which is the ultimate objective.

WordPress: power to the people

Gutenberg was criticised for the process as much as the end product. Fair enough. But let’s not forget that WordPress is the expression of the collective efforts of many passionate volunteers. They’ve given up their valuable time to help move the platform forward, and if you look at the stats… it’s working.

Over 30% of ALL websites run on WordPress, which is an incredible figure. WordPress has achieved  ‘hyper-scale’ just as much as the likes of Facebook, Google and Amazon. But with a very important difference: the business imperative is not to squeeze out as much $$$ and/or personal data out of its customer base.

WordPress is a prime example of how open source can output great products, drive innovation, and nurture a healthy community and ecosystem of products and services around it, and not sell out in the process.

[tweetshare tweet=”If you’re running WordPress for your business, project or to simply publish your thoughts, you’re helping the internet remain free. So, thank you for creating with WordPress.” username=”wphosting”]

We’re very aware of this here at WP Hosting and this drives our strategies as much as our commercial goals. As far as our products and positioning are concerned, we see ourselves as part of the operational stack that serves an open platform, and just like a Gutenberg block, can be easily replaced. Not that you would want to do that!

I believe this is much more aligned with WordPress’ vision to Democratize Publishing than what some of our competitors are doing by taking WordPress, adding a bunch of propriety tools on top of it, setting limitations and selling it as an (expensive) SaaS offering.

Thank you for trusting us with your creations

This one is for our customers – the Australian bloggers, businesses, developers and agencies that have trusted us with their websites since we first launched 2008. We enjoy serving you, helping your websites run faster and seeing your businesses and projects thirive.

Last week I wrote to our partners to thank them for their continued support. In my email, I explained some of the new things we’ll be working on in 2019, but also that we plan to carry on as usual: serving Australian companies, sticking to WordPress, upgrading our tech and growing our team locally. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, right?

That said, we’re working on some exciting new projects, so keep an eye out for announcements here and our newsletter.

That’s it from me. Have a great end of the year and best wishes for 2019.

Cheers,
Lawrence