Table of contents
Open Table of contents
Intro
Every promise is a debt, as I said in the website presentation, and I’m here to pay my first debt: a very opinionated thought.
My first post is one of the reasons why I opened this blog: WordPress is a powerful tool that people abused too much.
As a software engineer and as a person who deserves stupidity, I have too expose my opinion with my logic reasons.
If you agree with me, let me know. But, if you have a different opinion you must let me know it! Maybe you can let me change opinion and I will write why WordPress I still a thing for most of websites.
How WP is used as of today
We cannot draw conclusions until we don’t take care of how WordPress is used in current days. It’s simple since it’s everywhere:
- corporate websites
- landing pages
- personal websites
- online journals
- shops
Data don’t lie
Words are just words, but data is unequivocal: 43,3% of public websites use WordPress.
This is crazy, WP is the standard de facto. But, percentage doesn’t mean quality and there are too much people out there that think that is right to do something just because we’ve always done it this way.
Who uses WP
In Italy we say that everyone “tira l’acqua al proprio mulino” (literally: to bring (the) water to one’s mill) but I’m not a gatekeeper and I don’t like anyone who pretends to be someone else.
Historically, many different professional roles emerged as webmasters even if they had different study paths, or none at all. In the free market, these figures have emerged for various reasons:
- they were the first to offer this service
- good self-advertising skills
- end customers who do not know how to recognize quality and professionalism
Time has passed and end customers have ended up becoming fond of the webmaster and the WordPress technology so as to make the sentiment “we’ve always done it this way” more and more valid. Even those who have no idea what an HTML tag is, know WordPress.
The fact that end customers know WordPress has meant that they are increasingly looking for figures who can create a website with this technology (ignoring that others exist). This process is a self-sustaining loop and has produced the current diffusion result.
So, who uses WordPress? Anyone, and I mean anyone!
- people who don’t know what cybersecurity is
- people who don’t know how to place a button who improvise as CSS experts
- people who don’t know what image size optimization is
- people who think they are using a simple tool (no tool is ever simple)
- marketing professionals
- companies with multiple figures within (marketing, authors, developers)
As you can see, not all of these users are wrong. WP is a tool and as such it is right to use it if you know how to use it.
Website should be just a website
This sentence seems trivial but it is not at all.
WordPress was born as a blogging tool and therefore is designed around the concept of “I have to render content dynamically because it can change frequently”.
But, websites are not always blogs, on the contrary! Generally, websites are nothing more than a set of pages updated once a year (or even after several years) so it would be enough to use HTML pages as they were intended from the beginning: static.
Using WordPress, or more generally a CMS, to create pages that will always remain so is like having a waiter at home with a tray in his hand on which the phone is placed: it would have been enough to use a simple piece of furniture.
The comparison is intentional because we then get to the real point of the problem: the ecological impact and sustainability of using WordPress for almost completely static sites.
Ecology and sustainability
I am a person who pursues principles and who does self-analysis of what he does every day, the thing that makes me angry is: how have we not seen the elephant in the room until today? (No pun intended between elephant and PHP)
Having a server space with a database and a webserver always active only to render static pages that change on a yearly basis is a hallucination (one of many).
This approach is the worst thing there is in terms of ecology since all those resources, however small and reduced, impact the environment given that it is used by half of the existing websites.
What about sustainability? This can be understood from various points of view: environmental, safety and manageability of the site. In all these cases, people using WP are an obstacle because:
- they don’t update WP and its plugins, exposing themselves to attacks (which wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t a static site)
- they use old servers that consume more (they don’t even know what they actually use)
- they don’t produce maintainable pages and leave UI/functional bugs here and there everywhere
As you can see, WP is not the real problem but it is the people who use it recklessly.
As if all the people in the world were shooting fireworks into the sky instead of simply saying hello or making a phone call. Would the problem be fireworks or those who use them in the wrong way? It’s a stupid example I know, but people in the world are stupid.
Conclusions
Concluding this discussion, even if I have deliberately overlooked many aspects, we can say that WP is a collective hallucination not due to the fault of the tool itself, which is an excellent product, but due to the fault of those who have used it in the past and of those who continue to use today in the wrongest way possible.
So what is the right way to use? An infallible recipe doesn’t exist but I certainly consider it perfect when used for what it was born for: a simple CMS.
And why doesn’t this site use WordPress since its content is just a set of articles? Well, I’m a developer so I always aspire for perfection and to have a strong tool in my hands, but that’s a topic for a future article.