WordPress underwent groundbreaking changes with the rollout of WordPress 5.5 in August 2020 and the recent major release of WordPress 5.6 “Simone” just this December 8, 2020. The latest development features an all-women squad heading the release.
When the WordPress 5.5 squad was announced in May 2020, it was also announced that an all-women squad would be shadowing the 5.5 crew to help learn the release process.
But amid all these exciting developments, experts still do wonder if WordPress still stands as the best content management system (CMS).
Changes that Came With the Recent Updates
There’s no question that the WordPress team worked incredibly hard to make WordPress what it is today, and they all did a great job considering the minimal development time between updates they had to work with.
Here are some changes implemented:
- Pages feel and load faster.
- Having an XML sitemap functionality so search engines discover your most important pages.
- Intuitive editing.
- Ease in copy-pasting content From anywhere.
- User-friendly even to new web designers.
However, for the most popular CMS that powers about 39.3% of all websites, not rushing the new update development could have been better. Their dominance as a CMS platform is not foolproof.
The best digital solutions for businesses often spring up from augmenting unsatisfied customers who are not met by leading or current providers. That is also how it is for technology.
The Gutenberg YouTube built-in block also doesn’t function on certain pages. It is not acceptable to know that WordPress is the top CMS platform today.
However, Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast, mentions that phase 2 of Gutenberg also rolling out this year will replace widgets and menus with blocks. Also, WordPress is updating its minimum PHP requirements, which is good news for developers.
Aside from this, there are more reasons why WordPress will continue to dominate in 2021.
10 Reasons Why WordPress Will Remain a Strong CMS Platform
1. The Release of WordPress 5.5, “Eckstine,” Has Been Downloaded More than 65 Million Times
The download counter at WordPress.org shows a staggering 65 Million-times downloads for WordPress 5.5. If the WP community were that disappointed by past versions, then Eckstine would not have made headlines.
Remember, these are not the number of active WordPress websites but the current version’s active and historical (because a new version has been released) download numbers. It does not include download counts for the previous WordPress versions.
2. There is Still Room to Grow in WordPress
Despite being the most popular CMS, the WordPress platform leaves room for more creativity, innovation, and development. The current release of 5.6 by an all-women group shows that development is heading in an exciting direction.
Furthermore, WordPress 5.6, the latest release, significantly increases the number of downloads every day, and at the time of writing this post, there are over 5 million downloads. Keep track of downloads via the download counter at WordPress.org.
Its community also continues to thrive and caters to users, both beginners, and professionals alike. The market share of WordPress also increases year by year.
3. WordPress is Available in Over 100 Languages
The fact that WordPress is accessible in so many languages sets it apart from other platforms.
Currently, WordPress’s English language version is at the top of the list, with 71% of WordPress blogs. Next are Spanish (4.7%), Indonesian (2.4%), and Portuguese (2.3%).
The WordPress Polyglots team localizes the WordPress core, plugins, and themes.
4. WordPress Keywords Still Rank Higher
WordPress remains the fastest-growing web publication software, and Google Trends shows that keywords from WordPress rank higher than competitors such as Drupal, Blogger, and Sharepoint among search engine queries.
It means blogs and websites powered by WordPress get more leads and draw more traffic.
5. WordPress Has Over 20 Billion Page Views and 400 Million Viewers Monthly
WordPress handles an enormous amount of traffic daily. Its record was in 2016 when it got 187 million page views on election day.
WordPress users publish 70 million new posts each month and leave 77 million comments monthly as well. WordPress.com has an Alexa website ranking of 57 worldwide. Over 400 million viewers also looked at around 20 billion pages monthly this year alone.
6. WordPress is an Open-Source CMS with Several Contributors
The WordPress CMS platform is one of the largest open-source projects in the world, with a growing number of the best of the best contributors globally.
The WordPress team of developers has over 70 developers contributing to the WordPress core, which contains over 430,000 lines.
7. WordPress is Under the Hood of almost 12% of the World’s Top 10K Websites
Many well-known companies worldwide such as The Walt Disney Company, Sony Music, and PlayStation.Blog to name a few, prefer WordPress as their CMS. These companies are among the following Fortune 500 companies.
More examples are TED, CNN, NBC, People Magazine, TechCrunch, the NFL, UPS, and many more.
8. WordPress Plugins are Dominating
- Over 30% of All eCommerce or Online Stores Use WooCommerce – WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce WordPress plugin. It currently runs more than 1.5 million active stores online and has a 29% market share of the eCommerce technology market.
- Jetpack Was Installed on More than 2,000,000 New Websites in 2019 – Jetpack is a WordPress plugin for various traffic insights, social media integration, security, and backups. In 2020, Jetpack enabled WordPress users to publish 374 million posts automatically to social media platforms.
Users can also optimize, cache, and deliver 29 million images per day from WordPress.com’s CDN. But beyond that, it prevented 23 billion brute force attacks. - Akismet Blocked 487 Billion Spam Comments – Akismet defends the comment section of a site from spam, bots, and all kinds of cyberattacks. Akismet effectively stops millions of brute force attacks with over 1 million active installs.
9. WordPress Works Hard in Securing Users
WordPress has 1,312 employees spread across 72 countries. They can handle 175 million unique visitors with only a fraction of other big internet companies’ employees. Its open-source setup bids well for its 100% remote workforce.
But despite this, they work hard to keep users secure.
WordPress Denied 40% of DMCA Take-downs – WordPress allows users a lot of freedom of expression and uses, edits, and distributes the app in many ways.
WordPress.com works hard to carefully enforce valid copyright claims while countering claims that threaten innovation or freedom of expression.
There were 70,968 DMCA takedown notices from January 2014 to June 2019. Part or all of the content of these websites has been deleted. In its Transparency report, WordPress has published a shortlist of unsatisfactory requests.
WordPress Denied 65% of Information Requests – WordPress submitted 361 requests for information from governments and law enforcement agencies from July 2013 to June 2016. Of the 499 sites listed, WordPress released 35% of the information. WordPress is much more open about such concerns than other CMS platforms.
10. WordPress is a Lucrative Career Opportunity
WordPress can solve many of the problems businesses face online. It’s a safe bet that excellent skills in WordPress can translate into a lucrative career opportunity.
There is a high demand for skilled workers, freelancers, direct hires, and contractors. According to Indeed, WordPress developers make an average of $47,560 yearly.
There are several jobs for a WordPress professional, like writers and editors, web developers and designers, graphic designers, digital marketers, content managers, tech support, and the like.
The Future of WordPress and Web Development
1. Gutenberg Will Continue to Mature
Gutenberg brought more life to WordPress, attracting a new group of users, bloggers, and developers. And although the Gutenberg updates met a lot of questions, WordPress itself will undoubtedly continue to improve.
Phase 2 of Gutenberg replaced widgets and menus with blocks. The minimum PHP and other requirements will also allow developers to accomplish more since blocks will exist outside of the editor’s scope.
WordPress, however, will still maintain that the CMS is backward compatible with all versions of PHP. It discouraged a lot of web hosts from updating in the past. But developers are looking forward that WordPress will also enforce new standards to improve their service.
2. New Changes
WordPress has gone through some significant changes aside from the Gutenberg editor. They also have new leadership roles for Josepha Haden and Joost De Valk. The WordPress Governance Project is also gaining momentum.
3. A focus on Collaboration
Developers are looking forward to the WordPress core focusing on collaboration. It could open up a lot of opportunities for new business ideas and also will make WordPress a much more powerful tool for publishing.
4. Theming
A new customizer is on the way that will make web design and content development more dynamic. This new feature is expected to make WordPress a more user-friendly CMS platform, not just for long-timers, but for modern web designers who will be able to use WordPress even more like a pro.
5. Wider Adoption for New Designers
The whole playbook for 5.0 features new installs to encourage engagement from people who think the Classic Editor is too hard. Gutenberg will also be more prominent even in other areas of WordPress and its front-end development.
The Core team’s challenge is to seamlessly merge a front-end editor with WordPress’s typical long-form writing experience.
It will affect themes because Gutenberg is like a renaissance of sorts for themes and theme developers. There will be a decoupling of themes from plugins and content because the theme’s features are within the database through blocks.
6. Evolving WordPress Open Source and .com
We will see more distinctions between the open-source WordPress.org and the commercial part of WordPress.com.
Agency projects will be more significant in scope, and more small businesses will adopt the .com side of WordPress.
It will eventually create a definite division from the Open Source side from what is managed by Automattic.
7. Increase in WordPress Page Builders
We will see more page builders rise with WordPress. Each page builder has its community. Over the years, many page builders have come and gone. However, there is a group of page builders that have lasted.
Some have shifted into something different as well, while some have morphed into something different.
Take, for instance, Gutenberg’s addition, which makes page builders unnecessary for customizing blog posts. These page builders offering this specific feature have sadly lost their competitive edge and no longer operate.
But for page builders that have endured these massive changes, they have and will continue to mature, together with the loyal community around it, no matter what changes have happened to WordPress in the past few years.
8. Privacy and Security are Website Norms
In the past, privacy policies were standard only for online sellers. With all the cybersecurity attacks going on, that is no longer the case.
There are now standard laws on information and privacy that are set in place around the world. It is now crucial to have a privacy policy and service terms, especially since your website will be collecting user data.
9. Gutenberg Phase 3
Phase 3 of the WordPress Gutenberg editor would involve multi-user editing and co-editing. With multi-user features, multiple developers, designers, and content creators will simultaneously edit the WordPress document.
Multi-user editing is already being practiced in different suites for productivity, content creation, CRM, and more. Making the most out of collaborative tools for business is the wave of Industry 4.0 and the digital age. We shall see more apps and digital tools operate this way, including WordPress.
10. Multilingual Site Support
Phase 4 of WordPress 5.0 development will support multilingual site requirements. Big IT companies are now prioritizing AI-powered and automated multilingual features. The Microsoft AI Translator is a great example.
A comprehensive multilingualism feature will be available to WordPress users. These features are brought about by utilizing third-party multilingual plugins and plugins developed by WordPress developers.
There will be 28 major languages supported, which can easily be added via the plugin, namely ATIT Languages Plugin.
Conclusion
WordPress cannot please everyone, but WordPress continues to have extensive development and serve most of the best websites worldwide compared to other CMS platforms.
It provides excellent flexibility, and reliable backups and is highly accessible and secure. WordPress manages security for its users and immediately provides patches for any security issues it encounters.
WordPress has strong customer support and a community of experts and enthusiasts, so whatever wall or dead end you encounter, you can find help and guidance right away.
For these reasons and more, WordPress will continue to dominate the CMS sphere this 2022 and even beyond.
