Because if you try to move the timeline module to Divi or Elementor , you can't . It's locked into that page builder . The promise of the block editor is that you'll be able to take that anywhere .
Take it to any other WordPress website and you'll literally highlight with your mouse command C , go to your other website , command V , you just paste in the block and everything just works out of the game . I nearly said out of the block . But the point is it can do all of that and with a little bit of practice you can build those things yourself .
Welcome , friends , in episode three hundred and three . We've been talking a lot recently on the podcast about WordPress and where it's at in relation to other platforms , other website builders , and there's definitely a lot going on as far as changes go in the landscape of web design and where WordPress is .
And a question that I see a lot and that I honestly kind of wonder myself is is WordPress on the decline and how are people who are getting into web design now viewing WordPress ? Is WordPress going to be going to be able to continue to combat other platforms such as Wix , squarespace , webflow and others that are really taking off ?
Where does it fit in the DIY crowd versus the designer and developer crowd ?
So many questions I've had about WordPress myself , so I wanted to bring some on the on the podcast , who is a big time WordPress proponent and knows a lot about WordPress because he's been in the industry for a very long time and he's been in the WordPress community for a very long time . In fact , he actually has a podcast about WordPress .
This is Nathan Wrigley , who is the co-host of the WP builds podcast , and one thing I really appreciate about Nathan , among many things , apart from also being the co-host of the page builder summit , which is one of the top summits for WordPress and web design . But he is also a big fan of the block editor .
And the block editor for WordPress has not gone over well for a lot of people , including myself , but I got some hope with it after hearing Nathan and his perspective on this .
You know we recently had Dave Foyon on the podcast , who is all about Bricks , and Bricks is one of the newest and most popular page builders for WordPress and he was even talking about not jiving with the block editor for WordPress , but for anyone who does , it's really interesting to hear their perspective on it and that's exactly what we're going to talk about
more with Nathan Wrigley here . So I'm going to bring Nathan on again , go to WPBuildscom to connect with Nathan and to subscribe to the WP builds podcast .
Really , really fun chatting with somebody who is not a different mindset with WordPress but has a different perspective on WordPress from what I've had and really kind of set me at ease with what he's seen in the landscape and where things are headed .
So I hope for you who are a WordPress supporter and don't want it to go anywhere and don't want it to go on the decline . I think you'll have some hope in life after this conversation . So , without further ado , here is Nathan Wrigley of the WP builds podcast . But yeah , nathan , it's great to have you on the show .
Man , I figured today we'll dive into kind of maybe the state of WordPress and just web design general , because there's a lot of changes afoot . Is that kind of what you've seen in the industry ?
Yeah , there is a lot , there's tons going on in the WordPress space at the moment , in fact , more so , I would say , than at any point in the past . I mean , I've not been using it since right at the beginning . I probably began my WordPress journey in about 2014 .
Okay , and although there was a lot of new , innovative things coming along , they were basically in the plug-in and theme space and that was very interesting .
But at the moment , the WordPress core itself , the actual software that you would download from the repository WordPressorg , the software that you use , that you then throw plugins and themes on top of that itself has been undergoing a dramatic change over the last three , four , five years .
And just for some context , what were you using leading up to that ? I think I heard in a recent episode that you were using Drupal at one point . Yeah , that's right .
I began making Word Sorry Web site so synonymous in my head with WordPress and websites that I often say the wrong word . I began making websites before the year 2000 . And it was all tables based layouts and it was in that era where you had to open up a text editor or something .
There was a Microsoft product called Front Page , which was awful but fairly good at the time .
That was the trickier thing to Dreamweaver right . Dreamweaver was like brilliant . I was dreaming of a Dreamweaver , a real game changer .
Yeah , that was amazing . So I used those kind of things , but mainly it was a text editor . And then CSS came along and that made a lot of things a lot easier .
And then I discovered CMSs , so content management systems , so , yeah , things like Drupal and Magento , and I did for a long , long time well , not quite as long as WordPress , but probably for four years or something I used Drupal and I have absolutely no axe to grind with Drupal at all . I really enjoyed it .
It was absolutely fascinating Different environment in that more or less everything in the Drupal ecosystem was completely free . There hadn't been a flip over to commercial pro modules so they use the word module instead of plug-in and literally everything was free .
Now , what that meant was that the community didn't kind of grow in the same way , because you had to really commit a lot of time for the benefit of the project and there was no opportunity to sort of commercialize that . So at some point I just thought , okay , time to change .
Drupal , moved over to version eight and when they did a major update from six to seven , seven to eight and so on , they break compatibility largely with previous versions , whereas WordPress , for good reason , has decided not to break compatibility . That's not always the case , but broadly speaking .
So when it came to Drupal eight , I swapped over and just looked towards WordPress , and I've never looked back .
Never looked back . Well , I love talking with folks who have been in the industry for over 10 to 15 years , because there's so many changes that have happened recently , but also back then . But I'm kind of curious . So how long have you been in the industry of web design ? 20 plus year .
Yeah , but basically I mean , I don't run a big agency . I never had . I've never had pretensions at that , but also I don't think I would have been very good at that . I'm not very good at managing my time . Compared to people who seem to be successful in the agency space , I think they've got a much better grip of their time .
For me it was all about building local websites for local people , or at least you know sites that are reasonably local to me , and so it has . It's been about 20 years , Like most people who have been doing it for as long as I have . It was a case of just doing something that interested me . There really wasn't a career back then in web design .
You just sort of fell into it because some relation or friend said that they needed a website and you know , you're the guy that knows how to switch the printer on , so you can be the guy that tells the website , and so that's kind of how it grew .
And back then it was so much more straightforward that the end results were less good than they are now , but the required knowledge was so much simpler .
You basically got to learn a bunch of .
Sorry , you go on .
I was just gonna say this is such a great point . I started to interrupt , I , but you're hitting on an interesting point right up front , which is , like I feel like the barrier to entry .
While it was a lot harder to build websites , it's probably fair to say they were so much less overwhelmed back then , right , just because now , can you imagine getting into web design today ? I mean , the people that I help early on , their biggest overwhelm is just so many choices . They're like I don't know , you know what platform to use with WordPress .
There's a ton of different themes and builders and there's , like you know , there's almost like information and optionality Overwhelm right now , yeah whereas back when I began , you literally had to learn a handful certainly less than a hundred Things about HTML .
So you had to learn that you could nest things inside of divs and that there was a p-tag and that there was an h-tag and things like that . And then you you had to learn a little bit later CSS , but the but , the , the things that you could do with CSS were far less sophisticated than they are now . But then again the expectations were far less .
You weren't trying to do a whole bunch of things and there was a little bit of JavaScript being thrown around , and then things like JQuery came along and made that slightly easier . But what I'm trying to say is you didn't , you didn't really have to have to spend too much time it with a book because it was a book .
You were literally buying a book from a local bookstore because Amazon didn't exist . You had to go into a bookstore and buy something like I don't know HTML , primer , and you could read the thing in an afternoon or in a couple of days or something like that , and you you basically know Enough to get yourself started .
There was no Google , so there was no obsession about SEO . There was no performance speed optimization . Nobody gave that a thought , so so long as the pixels appeared on the page and it looked half decent , then people would pay .
Responsive design . No accessibility talk . No , no iPhone .
Right , there was just a desktop and but , but with with that you had yet all sorts of really thorny problems . Like you had a whole variety of different browsers which display things in different ways , were in a very lucky position now where the browser vendors seem to seem to speak to each other .
So Mozilla talked to the chromium team and chromium talked to the Safari team and , broadly speaking , the pixels on the page look the same . But back back in the day , things like Internet Explorer 6 , that was fun . Make a website , then show it in Internet Explorer 6 , and that doesn't even look vaguely sure .
If you were starting today , nathan , what would what would make it easier for you ? What would your process be to choose the right tool , because I mean , we're gonna talk about WordPress and where it's at in the market today and trends and everything but what . What would help you decide what tool to use ? What would be the metrics that you measure that on ?
Yeah , I guess it really does depend on what , what it is that you're trying to do .
So if you are trying to put pixels on a page and you're trying to be a web Designer we don't really use that term much anymore but if you're trying to be an implement or of web pages , so you're speaking to the end client I still think that WordPress is a Fantastic option , especially if you bundle into that the the suite of tools which go on top of it .
And you know , we could argue until the cows come home Whether element or is preferable to beaver builder , or whether beaver builders better than Divi or the block editor aka Gutenberg . But that seems to me a really credible choice . It gets you up and running .
There's boat loads of YouTube tutorials which will guide you through almost every problem you could possibly imagine . I mean literally . I would imagine there's a YouTube tutorial for every single problem that you would encounter .
So I think WordPress bundled with a page builder Is probably a really , really credible way to go , because you could start and within a month , I would say , you could be up and running . You know , would you be brilliant at everything ? No , would you be . You know good enough to put commercial things out . Yeah , you , you probably would .
It's a lifelong learning experience , but that would be a good way to get yourself off to the races . I think .
What are your thoughts on tools like webflow , square space and some of these others , because they are gaining popularity , I found not even with just the DIY crowd , but there are a lot of web designers who like particularly webflow .
I see Outside of , because my previous mindset was that a web designer is going to either do a custom coded site or WordPress , like even five years ago . No web does like true web designers Not many that I knew , at least .
We're using square space or wicks or things like that , but webflow in particular Seems to be a platform that I see a lot of web designers gravitating towards . I know a lot of my students are using it now . Yeah , that's on some of those that are kind of the the ancillary options to work .
I think ? I think they're really credible Because , well , the internet has more or less eaten everything up , isn't it ? It's , it's made a commodity about just about everything .
You know you can order your food through the internet , you can order your , the things that you consume , you know your ebooks or whatever , over the internet , and I think they're really credible .
You know , if you're , if you're owning a bricks and mortar store , you've got limited turnover , you've got a small budget and you're happy to go with something like square space . That seems like a really credible thing .
One of the things that I've always been keen on is owning your own data , because , allah Malti Although that is a that's kind of like a hard problem to get hold of why that's important , I think . Let's imagine a scenario where square space fell out of favor and their bottom line just fell through the floor and they went out of business .
Well then , so does your blog , so does all of the hardware you put into it , and although that doesn't seem like it's possible , there are the . You know the history of the internet is littered with companies that look like they would be around forever . You know , my space would be a perfect example . Look like it couldn't fail and then Facebook ate its launch .
So the the argument that I've always thought is I think you're better off with a platform that you own and you run on . That data is yours and so I . I personally wouldn't Touch those other platforms .
I'm completely embedded in WordPress and committed to WordPress , but I can see how , at $19 a month whatever the price point is for those services , you know , $240 a year or something like that they're pretty credible . Yeah , but I do think that the the problem that WordPress has faced is one of onboarding as much as anything else .
You know that confusion when you first log in . I think the square spaces and the wicks have handled that really well . You pay it 20 bucks and within minutes you've got something that looks credible . You know we could talk about what the code is like and whether it passes call with vitals and things like that , but it looks great out of the box .
You click a button , you got a template . But I think that a lot of the WordPress plug in landscape , the theme landscape and also the hosting Landscape quickly . Well , they already have for years . They're waking up to the fact that this churn that WordPress has can be kind of gotten rid of by having onboarding wizards .
There's a load of hosting companies at the moment that you know . You pay something similar $20 a month , something like that and in the olden days you then be hit with C panel . Okay , now you got to install WordPress . Okay , now you ? Where is ? Now you'll be hit with a . Okay , what kind of website do you want ? What kind of business you in ?
What's your preferred color scheme ? Let's press the AI button and you've got yourself a website in the same amount of time it would with wicks and square space , but they using it with with WordPress , and all of these endeavors are making WordPress More and more , more and more usable . I guess you get .
Yeah , and a little bit maybe , but seems like WordPress in the hosting companies , in the in the sphere out like all the companies around it , are trying to make the UX and just the experience of getting things going and particularly the setting up phase , which used to be really cumbersome yeah just like you're trying to take a book out of the page , out of the
square space book or web flow book .
Yeah , I mean it wasn't pleasant , was it ? I mean , if you're a non technical person , the idea that you paid your hosting company and then you're introduced to see panel , it's kind of old lord what I mean what do I do ? now you know the facts of the beginning . But these , these hosting companies , you know you can name them all .
We won't name them individually , but you can name them right . You know who they are . They're investing millions of dollars into the big problem that they've got , which is churn . They have thousands of people that come through their , their systems on a monthly basis and a proportion of them they can see the metrics .
The telemetry says after a certain period of time , x percent fall off . We had them , we had them and then they just went away because they looked at WordPress and thought I don't even know what to do with this . It's taking care of that yeah , you mentioned .
I feel like you almost called me out there without realizing it because you said you're committed to WordPress and I have been for years and I still am . As far as my site , I still am a total WordPress guy through and through have been since 2012 when I got into it .
But my community , my membership , which is called Web Designer Pro , is actually built on a platform called Circle and it is the only all in one self hosted style platform that I've ever committed to using and is freaking awesome .
Like I am now a like 50 percent WordPress guy and in 50 percent Circle guy and I never thought that I would ever move from WordPress as far as another platform , because I could have created a membership in WordPress for sure .
But when I heard about Circle and I had some mentors and colleagues of mine start using it once I got into it for the need of having my membership , which includes live calls , events and Community and courses and everything all included it ended up just .
I still , to this day , think it was one of the best decisions for me in my business and it's the reason I say that is because it's like I'm not , I'm not , I'm not fully committing to any other platforms or anything .
But it did change my mindset around like what is possible with an all-in-one solution like that , and before I would have never , even , you know , been tempted or been baited by a Buy something other than WordPress . But now , after seeing that , it does make me think like I wonder if that's going to Impact WordPress over the next five to ten years .
Yeah , so I think it's you know , you only have to cast your eyes around on on the web to realize that there are sass apps for everything , right , and they're just . They're just brilliant because they do this thing they do . They've zeroed in on Whatever the niche is .
My understanding with circle I could be completely wrong , because I don't use it , but my understanding with circle it's like a , it's like a community building platform , right , you , you can put courses in there and it's like your own Facebook or something like that .
You , you've just got all the things for people to talk to each other and you can put your courses in there and people can pay . Yeah , you can do that in WordPress . But if you've settled on this thing and it's it's , you know , there's less design work to be done by you . There's less I don't know updates of software , less unexpected things .
You can rely on it . Well , why not ? I use , I use all sorts of sass platforms . There's probably a WordPress equivalent for more or less every one of them , but it just , it's quick , it's easy , I know it . It's not always the perfect solution , but I think in many cases it can be .
But , yeah , I , I , I would imagine that WordPress is Reaches probably not going to be affected by these little things which do this one niche well .
That's well . That's well said . I think there is a really Exciting time right now on web design where you can use both , depending on the situation in my . My situation currently is the perfect example Of that .
I still love using Divi and having my WordPress site for my site , because I have full control of all the pages , all the design Elements , all the layouts , all everything that I want to do on my site that I couldn't customize with circle , but circle in the way of , like the , the functionality of running a membership , doing calls , doing coaching .
I don't want to worry about that stuff on that side of things , I just want to do what I'm doing there . But I'm right , it's a bit of a different , it's almost a different Usability case for me . Like , I use my site at joshallco differently than I use my membership site . So yeah , it's a good .
Yeah , I think there's always gonna be a . There's always gonna be a big place for sass . So , as an example , we're recording this on a , on a like a Platform which allows you to record audio and video and it puts it up into the cloud and then later on you can download it that . Is there an alternative for this in WordPress ?
I actually don't know , but it wouldn't surprise me if there is . But this just works , right , you rely on it . There's people , there's bodies on the ground . If something goes wrong , you've got support over there . It just works . Yeah , I think the classification of the internet will not slow down . Yeah , I can't see . I can't see WordPress eating all of it .
So that leads me to another question I was curious about from your perspective , because you you have the W , are a co-showrunner of the WP builds podcast , and I'm curious . One reason I was excited to talk to you , to Nathan , is you also ? I talked to your partner in crime , anshin , who's a part of my membership now .
No , and she's she's gonna be on the podcast , I think , before this one will go out . Oh nice , she has a really interesting journey in the WordPress and everything too . But you do have a unique perspective , I think , because you're you're pretty far into the weeds with WordPress . Yeah , what , what excites you about WordPress ?
Yeah , there's an awful lot that excites me about WordPress . I think the most exciting thing at the moment is that what ? So up until about three or four years ago , if you , if you'd logged into what ? If you haven't logged into WordPress for a long time , it's really really changed the , the , the If you log in , you won't immediately notice the difference .
But if you in the past , if you wanted to create a post or a page or any content that would go on the front end , you , you use this little text editor and if you wanted to add in features , you would throw plugins in and then maybe you'd use short codes to put what that plugin did onto the page .
Now we have this thing called the , the block editor , and the block editor Comes from a project called the Gutenberg project , and Gutenberg , if you know , he was the , the originator of the printing press all those years ago , and the block editor kind of atomizes the , the , the idea of a post or a page , so you can throw in .
If you want to write text , you can throw in a paragraph block and that sits on the page and you start typing and Text magically appears there . If you want to chuck in an image , you can chuck in an image block and you can imagine what that does video , literally any kind of content that you can imagine .
There's a block for that , and if there isn't a block in the version of WordPress that ships we call that WordPress core then there's probably a Plug-in which will , you know , fill that gap . So there might be I don't know some sort of countdown timer or something like that .
There's , there's not a core block for that , but you can certainly find alternatives out there that will do all of the countdown time a thing . The thing is because it's made of blocks and those blocks fit onto the canvas of the page . With a little bit of pulling and dragging and page builder type scenario , you can . You can move them anywhere .
So the experience of editing things has become significantly better . Is it brilliant ? I like it . Is it perfect ? No , is it easy to learn ? There's a bit of a learning curve , but once you get over that hump , it's great . But the promise of the block is the block is like a little app . It's not like , it's not just so .
When I said it's paragraphs and things like that , it doesn't have to be just that . You could get somebody . You could do it yourself if you're skilled enough , but you could get somebody to build . Let's say you're doing a real estate website and you want to sell houses .
You could drop in a house block and the house block would then pester you and say what's the address , what's the price , upload at least 10 images Now find on a map where that house is , and that one block will do that all of that heavy lifting and you just chuck it onto the page , boom , and you've got yourself a real estate website .
You can imagine that in just about any scenario . These blocks are like little mini apps and in the future . It's beginning , but it's not fully fleshed out yet . It's the beginning . In the future , wordpress will become significantly more powerful because of these amazing blocks . The technology is very complicated , but it's brilliant .
Do you find the blocks scalable and maintainable and able to build on a more scalable level for something like a real estate site ? Then , yeah , they really do .
Yeah , they're incredible and most of the things load really quickly . Obviously , caveat emptor , if you try to chuck three trillion things into a block , you are going to make things slower , but typically it can be a very , very quick way of doing it . Like I said , it's not that straightforward to set up .
Well , it's not straightforward , it's just not as easy as perhaps I'm describing it , but anybody who wants to spend a bit of time , there's an increasingly copious body of work being created by what we call the Learn Team , the WordPress Learn Team , and they're creating tutorials around all of the new bits and pieces that are coming out and , yeah , it's very
exciting . It's a bit nerdy , but it is very exciting and it will make WordPress significantly more powerful .
So this is a different conversation I'm used to having , because most people , at least from my vantage point , and this is my personal experience do not care for the block editor , and I think for me personally , it's because I've come from the world of Divi , where I've been using Divi since 2014 . So back then it kind of reminded me of the block editor .
Now it's like it was in its infancy and had some bugs and some issues , but it evolves so fastly that now , and so quickly , when I tried out the block editor , I'm like this feels like where Divi was 10 years ago , like Divi is so far advanced with I don't know .
Not everyone loves Divi and that's fine , but any page builder , whether it's Bricks or whether it's Elementor or whatever , like some of these platforms , some of these themes and builders have been working on this for so many years that to me , I just wonder how could the team with blocks catch up to something like Divi , who's been working on the builder for 10
years ?
I confess , I'm not really a Divi user so I can't really speak to that . So one of the page builders that I've used quite a lot is called Beaver Builder . Great product , well worth checking out , Really great in fact , and the team behind it are fabulous .
There you go , there's a free advert for Beaver Builder , and they have these modules , and so you begin a page or a post or whatever it may be , with Beaver Builder and you give it your title and what have you . And then you enter the Beaver Builder interface and you drag in these modules , and these modules typically come with settings .
So it might be , let's say , I don't know , a timeline module and you add a thing and it puts a date at the top , and you add another one and it puts another date below it , and you get this sort of like feed of things . That was probably a bad example .
The point is that module handles something which you probably couldn't make yourself , and so it throws that onto the page and you fill out a bunch of settings .
Now , with the block editor , the promise is that you'll be able to do exactly that kind of thing , but it won't be locked into Beaver Builder , because if you try to move the timeline module to Divi or Elementor . You can't . It's locked into that page builder . The promise of the block editor is that you'll be able to take that anywhere .
Take it to any other WordPress website and you'll literally highlight with your mouse command C , go to your other website , command V . You just paste in the block and everything just works out of the gate . I nearly said out of the block , but the point is it can do all of that and with a little bit of practice you can build those things yourself .
That is a great distinction as far as a benefit of that . I didn't really think about it in that regard , but it is a good point as far as something being scalable and being able to be reused even with different themes , to have , like the core of the website or the pages be native to WordPress .
That way , maybe you'll use a theme for the header and the pointer , but then use the block editor for the page .
Right . So when the block editor came out it really didn't ship with the necessary things that you would want . That Divi just gave you right out of the gate . But it's getting much better .
So a lot of the key components of things , like laying things out , like grouping things and all of that we've got that group block now and all of these things , a lot of those necessary pieces , are now in place . So you can scaffold and you can make your website and you can make your page and you can make it pixel perfect . It's a bit janky .
It isn't quite like Divi in that every pixel will map on the back end to every pixel . In the front end . There's a few little UI quirks that mean certain things look a bit bigger than they should , but broadly speaking it works .
And in the future , well , now , in fact , we have these things called block based themes or block themes , and you can do whatever you want for the header and the footer inside the block editor . So you can just start , you chuck in the navigation block and you can just add posts and pages and it's all happening inside the editor .
And now we've got templates as well , so you can say I want everything with a category of I don't know pets to show this template and you just make that template . But I want everything with I don't know Christmas to show this template and you save those templates . But it's all done inside the block editor and it's great , it's easy , is it good ? Yay ?
Yeah , well , I appreciate it . I enjoy seeing your enthusiasm for it because , again , it's just , it wasn't my personal experience , but I came from probably a different starting point with the block editor when I tried it out . But I do see the value in that and I think you're also probably maybe because of your background up to this point .
I imagine you're pretty patient with this type of technology and you it seems like you are not necessarily as excited about where it's at right now , about where it's going to be in the next little while .
Really think it's going to be very , very powerful in the future . Yeah , I really do . And I think couple that with things like headless technology , which isn't for everybody , but if you couple it with that kind of technology , you can have WordPress as the you know , the backend , and then you could have a different front end .
You could do all sorts of things with that . Yeah , I am very , very bullish about it . I think it just gets better and better and better . But patience is the right word .
I think a lot of the things that we've got now it would have been great to have three years ago , because then we wouldn't have had people , you know , like you , just looking at it and thinking what ? This is nowhere near what I can do with Divi . I can do with Divi in an hour . What will take me 15 hours with the Block Editor .
I think that landscape is changing a little bit and we're more likely to be able to do things in the same amount of time .
What were you using prior to the Block Editor ? Did you have a page builder , of any ? Yeah , did you use anything that you used before ? That that's right ?
Yeah , I did . I used Beaver Builder . Oh , that's right . The reason I chose Beaver Builder is , I don't know , it just looked like the right one to me . I played with it , I got familiar with it and then I just enjoyed it .
Then they came out with this really great , groundbreaking product called BeaverThema , which now doesn't seem like a big deal because all the other I could be wrong . Maybe they didn't innovate that , but I think they did . But I could be wrong . It enabled you to do things like the headers and the footers and all of that kind of stuff .
You could do all of that in the page builder . It just sat in that sweet spot . I have no axe to grind against them . We were talking about them earlier with the free advert , but I've just decided that for me , the block editor is the way . I'm now quicker in the block editor than I've been in any other tool at all .
And that's the thing . And I think the narrative has changed , at least from what I've seen over the past couple of years , because previously and I was in the div I was far entrenched in the divvy world and I struggled with this a little bit . My mindset was like , well , divvy's the best , Everything else is second par .
But now I've realized there are great things about Elementor , there's great things about Beaver Builder , there's great things about the block editor , there's great things about Bricks . Any one of these will work . I really do think it just depends on what jives with you .
And I think a lot of times too , as an educator in this space now , I'm finding that people are coming to me and a lot of people are like you know what ? Whatever you use , I'll just use that because there's so many freaking options . I just want to make money and build my business , and you can get hung up on all the different options .
Like we talked about earlier , I've learned to just kind of whatever works for you and whatever you like . That's my approach to all my students , at least .
Yeah , I think . So long as you can Look . If you're shipping websites to clients and they want to know how to edit it , so long as you can tell them how to edit it , shoot some videos about . Okay , this is the interface . It's called divvy and this is how it works .
If you want to change the title , this is where you go Click this , click this , blah , blah , blah . If you can make all of that and you can make it work , it's great , isn't it ? Isn't that wonderful about WordPress that there is all of that ? Because we were talking about SAS , wix , squarespace .
You don't get a choice of the editor , you just get what Wix and Squarespace give you , whereas you know you like divvy , well , it works with WordPress . You like bricks . So does that ? Beaverbuilder , don Elementor , it's all working . Don't want any page builder , but you're happy with the Block Editor . It's all there . It's brilliant , isn't it ?
Just think about that for a minute . You've got all these products just built on top of this free platform . That's pretty cool , it is pretty cool .
It is very , very cool , and I think WordPress changed the game from when I got into the industry in 2010 . I was . I got into it right when WordPress was starting to really pick up steam and I mean , I had built one Drupal site , did one site in Joomla . I'll never get that year back from my life .
You know there were some of those and then WordPress came along . It was just like a night and day difference and back then it was the days of picking a theme and you would just build off of that theme that looked like a you know , a dentist's website or whatever . So it is interesting . I mean , the landscape has changed so fast recently .
I don't know , from your perspective , nathan , do you feel like things have changed more quickly and the pace has been faster and changed the past few years compared to 20 years ago ? Or has it always been this path ? Because to me it seems like we're at such a feverish pace of changing the past now . But maybe that's just my perspective .
No , I think you're right . I certainly see the pace accelerating and this kind of is , I guess , a product of the market share that WordPress has got .
There was this period over the last sort of seven or eight years where the and I don't really know what the metric is , but it's something like this Of the top 10 million websites , how many of them use WordPress , and so it's a broad brushstroke of what percentage of people are using WordPress on the web .
And up until recently , over the last decade , that curve has just gone , and if you're not watching this on video , my hand is going up like an exponential curve . It's gone up and up and up and up , to the point where it was getting towards fast approaching sort of 45% , hovering around 43% of the web . So pick 100 websites at random .
43 of them will be built on top of some kind of wordpress thing , and obviously with that goes the interest in the commercial side of things . You know , boy , there's a , there's millions and millions of people using wordpress , so we can build things on top of it . You know we were just saying about page builders .
So , yes , I think , I think it has it's got more and more commercial . I don't say that I probably should have rephrased that Sentences got more and more busy as more and more things of coming , and many of them are commercial , and this is a thing which the community is having to address .
On the one hand , you got people who Possibly not that comfortable with the commercial side of its success , and then you've obviously got people who are , and you know that's what they do for a living , and so it has got , it's got faster and faster and faster , more and more and more buyouts , more and more commercial products in the space , but it sort of seems
to have plateaued . I don't know .
I was just gonna say . I've seen mixed reports and mixed results on whether it is declining in market share or whether it's just stayed stable and kind of stagnant . I've seen some things on that , but either way that happened years . Forty three percent is around what I've seen .
I couldn't say . The word stagnate seems to be about the right one . In other words , I think it's hovering there , maybe it's going down , I don't know if it's tanking or anything like that , but it you know , it's still a giant amount of people .
What's your favorite statistics site ? Do you have something that you check in regularly ?
You know I do , but I couldn't tell you what it is because I haven't . I have this . You remember google reader , the rss feed . I have an rss app . Okay , I use it's . It's not a plug in , it's a , it's a sass app and whenever , whatever site it is that dish out those statistics updates , I get the update reading . I wonder how I live .
It was ten years ago I put that into the rss . I know w3texcom is one of the probably it okay I was just looking at that now I know that's . That's the one I usually go to . From what I know , that seems like it has the the healthiest metrics comparatively , yeah .
So yeah , I was wondering about that Does it say what we're at the moment ? Does it have a movie word forty three ? So it has .
this is for content management systems . Yeah . So I don't know if that's in relation to all the other technologies as well , but this also says square space , shop of five , shop of five , four percent , wix at two point five . Square space to , so that even that like that tells you that there is such .
It's nearly half internet is word press and everyone else is sharing the rest of the pie .
Yeah yeah , that's true . If you just took who commerce and I read the statistic last week , so I think this is up today who commerce just will come us is nine , eight point nine , nearly nine , nine percent of the internet . Wow , so that's a plug in on top of wordpress which allows you to have a shop . Yeah , just that is approaching nine percent .
Yeah , yeah , you think about ?
Freaking that is . That is wild . So , needless to say , wordpress we're all still in good hands as wordpress users , but I I like you know , I really appreciate your mindset on this too , which is that there really is not a right or wrong way to go about this is where it works for you , where it works for clients .
Whatever you enjoy , as freeing is that is , it's daunting and overwhelming because you gotta make that decision and of course , you know when you build a business you have to be careful and , and I thought , not too slow .
But you don't want to be quick to pull the trigger on a tool and then regret it a couple years down the road and have twenty clients on a tool you want to migrate them from , but at the same time , there's so many options out there , which is pretty cool .
Yeah , so you hear about your excitement with wordpress , because that's refreshing after there is a bit of a mixed Reception that I saw in my circles after word camp this year went to work at word camp , us and dc and yeah , they showed off some stuff with the block editor and stuff and the . Everyone was kind of like I don't know .
I just I'm not sure about this , so I was kind of cool seeing your excitement and and yeah , yeah , I think it's .
I think you just mentioned about , you know , being a different platforms and what have you .
I think the idea that there's no vendor lock in with wordpress is such a compelling thing , especially in the enterprise and things like that , where If you go with this proprietary platform and they don't serve you right or whatever it may be , you know , you just , they just allow you to do what you need with wordpress .
You can , if you fall out with the agency that you're working with , you can just ask for a download of the database and the files and take it to another agency and begin the exact same work over there . Yeah , so that's a that's another good reason to use these open platforms as opposed as opposed to closed ones good point .
Well , nathan , I know you're on time crunch . I know it's evening time over there in the uk for you , so I'll let you go . Where should people go to connect with you and find out more about yeah ?
Yeah , thank you . The best place is the wp builds website , that's wp builds dot com . So one word Is a podcast and a bit of a wordpress nerd First , really , where we just just put loads of wordpress content out each and every week . So yeah , wp builds dot com would be the place awesome .
Will have that like nathan . Thanks for your time and this is been a fun , fun chat with you and the page builder summit . You guys you and anchin have just been rocking that so it's been an honor to be a part of that . The past couple rounds and I love you guys are up to so thank you for having yeah thanks . So there we are , friends .
I've been enjoyed this conversation with nathan again . I tried the block editor for wordpress and hated it , but it's interesting hearing somebody who enjoys it and who has a different Perspective and a little more patience with it than than perhaps I did , being a divi guy who is used to a certain level of Expectation when it comes to a page building experience .
So I certainly hope you enjoyed this conversation and have just as much hope as nathan does and I do for wordpress in the future To leave your comments and feedback on this episode . Good josh hall dot co slash three zero three . And again , to connect with nathan , make sure to check out his podcast , w p builds .
You can find out more by going to w p builds dot com and I believe the next page builder summit which he is a co host on Is sometime in q one , I think maybe late q one . So you can also go to page builder summit dot com to connect with them there .
I highly recommend Making sure you keep eyes out for the next page builder summit , which is going to be a big one in q one and then 24 . So , yeah , very , very cool . Lot of cool things coming up again , nathan , is that w p builds dot com . Thanks , friends , love to hear feedback at josh hall dot co .
Slash three zero three , and I hope you enjoy this episode and look forward to some more , because we got some do'sies coming up as well . So make sure you subscribe to the podcast , leave a review If you have yet to leave your review on pie or on apple or on spotify , and I really , really value your feedback .
And hey , cheers , cheers to wordpress and cheers to a hopeful future for the block editor . I'll get behind that for a sake of nathan . So cheers to the block editor , wordpress . Alright , friends , on the next one .