The use of WordPress to build websites in China in 2022

Last updated on January 17, 2022

WordPress is one of the most popular online content management systems (CMS). Since 2003, this open source platform has been helping web designers build gorgeous websites.

Although this software was originally just a blog publishing platform, its development has gone far beyond personal websites. Hundreds of enterprises and organizations around the world rely on CMS to run their websites.

In the past two decades, the Internet has undergone tremendous changes, so we are carefully studying the market share of WordPress and the large websites using WordPress.

If you plan to build a new website, you may often be recommended articles with such titles as "10 Most Popular Website Building Systems", "5 Best E-commerce Website Systems", "20 Most Popular Blog CMS"... For such articles, just look at them, because ordinary people cannot have time to try these 5/10/20 website building systems one by one, Any website building tool can only be used well after in-depth understanding. It is impossible for one person to spread such energy to so many tools developed by others, let alone five or ten. I have never seen anyone who can use two at the same time. Note that "using well" here does not mean that you have built several websites in general, but that you can reach the level of experts in this small field.

Since only one can be used well, why not choose the first one, but those whose users are less than a fraction of WordPress?

It can be said that the software with more users is better than the software with less users, and there is no dispute. Especially for those software whose market share is decreasing, there must be a reason for the decrease. Users must be unable to bear some of their shortcomings before they turn to other competing products. Moreover, WordPress is a free open source software, and there is no problem of binding users. If users think it is bad, they can replace it.

Take a closer look at this table. What users of competing products whose shares have declined have WordPress attracted? The most obvious thing is that Joomla and Drupal, both of which are based on PHP development, are almost devoted to WordPress. Drupal is recognized as powerful, but it is difficult to use. It is more difficult to get started than WordPress. The main reason why Drupal failed to defeat WP was that it did not accurately grasp the balance between the function and the difficulty of secondary development. I don't think it is possible for senior developers of Drupal to invest in WordPress, but as time goes by, the number of old Drupal websites is gradually decreasing, and old developers will retire and change careers. With WP, whose learning path is relatively flat, few new developers will learn Drupal; The rest of Joomla is almost crushed by WP in all directions. The developers I know who use Joomla use Joomla because they first heard of Joomla and never heard of WordPress when they started to contact CMS for some reasons. That's all... Of course, anyone may face the information cocoon effect at some time, As a result, I cut off the opportunity to contact better things. I can only be thankful that when I was selecting the technology, I just hit the right door and didn't take this detour.

Let's look at the CMS, Shopify and Wix in the top five, whose shares are slowly increasing. These two are not independent CMS stations, but platform based Saas station building systems. With these two systems, you can almost build websites without writing code. This is a trend in the website building industry in recent years. It can meet a large number of primary users. However, the limitations of this form of website building are also criticized by many of their users: if you can't get the source code of the website, you can't do detailed modification and optimization; The most important thing is that the modification of the platform policy can close your website at any time, just like the blog of the user of My Space 10 years ago. It seems that it may happen at any time overnight. When these users started the "demand awakening" after they were satisfied with their primary needs by the Saas website building system, they returned to the embrace of independent website building and chose WordPress.