The future of the WordPress economy, and why I’m not worried

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Written By Joshua Strebel

4 thoughts on “The future of the WordPress economy, and why I’m not worried”

  1. Hi, Joshua.

    I’ve read Chris Lema’s article this week and I’ll try to don’t repeat the comment I did there.

    You’ve pointed out two things I believe are the biggest strengths in the WordPress economy: it is trusted by big companies/brands and, IMHO the most important, the community.

    I’ve been using WordPress since 2004. I’ve first started using it as a blog platform and eventually I’ve became a WordPress developer.

    The truth is that nobody knows what will happen with the WP economy but my biggest bet is on WP REST API.

    In 2014, while I was working for an agency, I had the opportunity to work in my first mobile app project.

    I was responsible to develop both the API and admin system to be used by our client and his collaborators. The app was something like Runkeeper and Waze for cycling.

    With this challenge in mind I asked myself if it couldn’t be built on top of WordPress. After a couple of days of research, I decided to do so. Coincidentally, the plugin I’ve used to serve the API was the one developed by Ryan McClue. =)

    The project was a successful and the app worked very well. I’ve also had a talk about this experience at WordCamp Belo Horizonte in 2014.

    My point is that we need to give some time for the community, and what they will build with the API.

    I don’t know how long it will take but I really believe this will disrupt the WordPress economy.

    BTW, currently I’m involved in a WordPress project where we will build a custom dashboard from scratch using the REST API. Let’s see what will happen.

    Congrats for this amazing article!

  2. Love the post Josh but I would expect that you and Post Status have a more transparency on the “28% of the web” number often cited freely.

    It is actually 28% of the top 10M sites. w3techs is common source of this number, here is the methodology https://w3techs.com/technologies

    Depends how you count, it is probably 10-15% of all websites. Not many attempts have been made to actually precisely quantify it. This is a good start https://www.rarst.net/wordpress/powers-internet/

    I think we would all love to know what is the right methodology and the number. If it is only 10% I can’t stop thinking, ‘what else is out there then?’

    Cheers
    Vlad

  3. “New businesses are constantly being formed around plugins, themes and services built specifically for WordPress, with no signs of stopping. In fact, we’ll continue to find more and more creators of WordPress specific companies, with full time jobs elsewhere, using this as an opportunity to contribute to the community”.

    Couldn’t agree more with Joshua. We started out as a normal web designing company 2 years back and the number of customers asking for WordPress has gone by almost 20% quarter on quarter. WordPress (if you know how to work your way around it) not just allows you everything in terms of design and flexibility that a normal html page would, but it also makes life much easier with all the plugins for specific needs.

    Whether it is image compression, enhancing the page speed, reducing response time of the server, helping with content readability, optimizing for SEO or making your website e-commerce ready. These are ALL very important aspects of running an online business. Many of these are an absolute must if you want search engines to notice your website. The science of floating a website and making it search friendly is still pretty new and WordPress definitely makes your journey much easier.

    The only problem with WordPress, however is constant updates in its core as well as themes and plugins. Besides, one has to be really careful about what plugins they are using. There are developers who are making plugins with the sole purpose of hacking others to get backlinks to their own websites. Its that easy to get backlinks if you have a plugin with a couple hundred downloads.

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