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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

Wix and Squarespace are imo infinitely harder to make look good/maintain than Wordpress (at least without Gutenburg). Just some basic tasks are needlessly difficult or impossible. I still think Wordpress is the go-to easy to build/maintain CMS.

IMO, I think Automattic introduced Gutenberg way too soon to Core and introduced it as very half baked. Still to this day it's very half baked to an incredible degree, some pages will just break outright and resort to JSON errors, not to mention the built in blocks are awful and 3rd party blocks often break. That probably turned off a lot of people. It's still easier to just buy a theme that has a built in page builder and you'll get similar Lighthouse scores to Gutenburg (this being for average users, not custom themers, etc).

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The problem with Wordpress isn't the ease of use, its the constant maintenance required. If you are a local restaurant, you don't need an extremely powerful and flexible framework. You need something that is always online, doesn't get hacked, doesn't have its certificates expire, doesn't run out of disk space because of a log file, doesn't get stuck on a 5 year old debian, etc.

If you have to pay a little more to have someone fiddle with squarespace for twice as long as they would wordpress, that's ok because its now set and forget.

Doesn’t Wordpress own Tumblr which ticks all the boxes you just described?

tumblr has multi-user access?

yes https://help.tumblr.com/hc/en-us/articles/226452848-Group-bl...

agree that the non-stop overly frequent maintenance is a serious pain point for site owners and developers.

Also agree with GP that gutenberg has been ruining WP since it was shoved into core, for many reasons.

If the classic-press fork of WP is still a thing it'd be better for most people.

Glad to see they are working with a performance team now.

Currently I find it best use one of the wordpress-to-static plugins to have a design spit out into static html and use that. (which then you can zip/archive and delete all the php / gutenberg / logins etc) It's safer and faster.

of course you would lose comments and easy client updates going static, and may need a contact form chunk of code to add after the fact in some cases - but it's my current suggestion.

Does the wordpress commercial offering not solve this issue ? Maybe I am wrong, but I understood it also as setup and forget. Any users of wordpress.com could provide more information..

Well it definitely does improve the security on the "Wordpress" part, but there's still the custom plugins to worry about. Sure, the Woo* plugins and other premium offerings are great, but there's still lots of niche plugins that don't work together with each other, or break on newer WP versions, etc.

Wordpress doesn't actually require that much maintenance at all, I feel like this is a myth or because people have only dealt with very old Wordpress builds. Wordpress now has automatic updates built into it, and large agencies or companies automate updates otherwise.

I don't understand your certs expiring, etc comment. That is because of your host if anything, and even the worst host now offer with Cloudflare or Let's Encrypt.

I've never heard of Wordpress eating up disk space due to a log file, sounds fairly made up tbh. I've had a log file eat up disk space from a poorly built custom CMS though, because it presented so many errors in the Apache logs. Hosts now maintain and update the Linux/Windows distros fairly regularly, and even when I ran dev/web ops you could automate this type of thing easily.

Businesses don't care about stuff like that. Especially if the alternative is free. Any maintenance is too much maintenance.

Wix and Squarespace aren't free though. Per workhour, Wordpress is still probably one of the, if not the, cheapest CMS for businesses to use for a basic website.

The subjective part is "look good". I've sent at least a dozen small business to Squarespace and helped them get it tuned -- the look has always been "good enough" for them to move on to real business problems. It gets their information into Google (et al), provides the domain to link to from their IG, FB, Twitter, etc, etc -- so those traffic sources resolve to their own main truth.

I’ve replaced about five or six different WP installs with square space now. Never had a problem with it looking good, and surely don’t miss the increased vulnerability footprint that comes with hosting WP.

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