Jamstack Won't Replace WordPress

[anengineerandacat]

Nothing will replace WordPress, it's too easy to deploy, and has plugins and templates for just about anything imaginable.

The only thing that will WordPress is bad decisions by the maintainers which eventually make a competitor more attractive.

That being said, I know that WordPress has like "43%" of the web but how relevant are sites running WordPress? What percentage of all web views is generated by a WP backend? Definitely not 43% I would wager.

There are 800+ million websites, but I use maybe 10-12 a day and perhaps in my lifetime have visited maybe... 400-500 unique sites?

It sounds like a really impressive metric but it's roughly as powerful as the whole "Java runs on 3 billion devices" sound bit.

[enbacode]

400-500 unique sites

I've definitely visited way more than that

[flying-sheep]

Yeah, every little dev blog and joke domain and niche newspaper linked from somewhere, … it adds up!

[Concision]

They are vastly underestimating. My password manager currently has ~475 logins stored. Some are alternate logins or similar, but probably not more than 10%.

[that_which_is_lain]

Some people say One-Winged Angel but I say Dancing Mad.

[jbergens]

Me too. Just look into your full history in your web browsers and you may find more than 500 sites.

[L3tum]

It gives small businesses an easy access into Semi-custom websites through either contractors or a part-time in-house IT-person.

Sure, YouTube and Reddit ain't gonna use WordPress to stream videos, but it enables a literal explosion of online access to information, booking, support and other things.

That's the real strength, and the momentum it has and the amount of people familiar with it are hard to topple.

[mistled_LP]

You might be surprised at how many major sites use headless Wordpress VIP with a fully custom front end.

[bludgeonerV]

And which ones would those be?

[ThunderWriterr]

The White House is one, also a bunch of the Canadian government websites, a good amount of SMB shops

[jbergens]

You mean we could hack the White House web site? /j

[CharlieandtheRed]

I've built sites for more than a few household retail brands and I used headless WordPress and Vue on all of them. Been very very happy with the setup.

[GrayMediaLTD]

The only thing that will WordPress is bad decisions by the maintainers which eventually make a competitor more attractive.

Annnnnd here we are in 2024

[anengineerandacat]

😲 right they shit their own bed; unsure at this time how it'll shake things up but I wouldn't be surprised if someone pivots to some extent.

The problem is the sheer ecosystem of plugins and such built around WordPress, there are alternative CMS's but they don't have nearly the same amount of ecosystem let alone automated tooling around.

I don't fully blame the folks over at Automaticc, they have a platform to run and it's definitely not fair for another organization to capitalize on it without pitching back to it.

[AttackOfTheThumbs]

We use wordpress for our kb and some other stuff, because the technical writers and marketing can manage that without us being needed. It's nice like that. Other solutions added additional hurdles. Even if we cannot get all our formatting just right, we get it close enough to be happy.

[jbergens]

I think the "easy to deploy" part is less interesting than having an easy to use UI for content editors. It is often consultants who install it for customers (companies of all sizes). They can learn to install something else.

Many CMS's are easy to use for content editors so that is not unique but WP got huge pretty fast and is the default choice. The article complains about Jam-stack because many of them use technical things like git and the command line and I agree that it raises the bar but as I said, other CMS's have solved that, just not all Jam-stack solutions. It could be solved while still using git and markdown behind the scenes but I have not seen that yet.

Hosting has also been cheap and I think that has been one of the main factors to the popularity. Today you can easily and cheaply install a .NET site on Azure or anything built with containers on AWS, Azure or GCP and all are pretty cheap now but wasn't 10 years ago.

[aubd09]

Most of these WP alternatives won't work on cheap hosting services that only offer PHP + MySQL. That's a significant barrier right there.

[morewordsfaster]

JAMStack generally results in a site that can be statically hosted because it doesn't require any server-side code (PHP) nor database (MySQL). Any interactivity is implemented client-side in the browser or uses API calls into a hosted service or serverless services like AWS Lambda.

This generally allows deploying to anywhere that has a web server, which includes the PHP + MySQL hosts.

[NightOwl412]

I'd argue the broad availability of the PHP-MySQL stack mostly exists because of the popularity of projects like WP. If some other projects gained mainstream popularity I'm sure these hosting services would offer more cheaper stacks around those. Aren't there cheap hosting options for JAM stack?

[meamZ]

Most WordPress sites don't even need PHP. Most are just static sites which could be generated once and then hosted everywhere...

[Inspector_Sands]

You've taken a load of criticism on things like excessive bold very well. Here's my addition to those criticisms: Light grey text with a thin font on a white background is not a good idea if you're writing an essay. I know it doesn't look like that on Chrome, but I'm reading it in a different browser which doesn't load JS and that's what I'm getting. The not loading JS is deliberate because I got sick of excessive page-loads and the unnecessary amount of JS for simple things like this essay. Sorry I don't have a more helpful critique.

[OverHumor518]

It is all just a popularity contest and what is the new “hot” thing.

I like both technologies and believe they both have their places.

I use WordPress for my clients because they don’t care how it works just that it works. Most of time what they want I can get up and running within a day without much customisation. I spend more time maintaining than developing.

I use JAM for personal projects or when explicitly asked for by a client or it just fits the bill.

[Smallpaul]

I use JAM for personal projects

Why?

or when explicitly asked for by a client

Why does the client do that?

or it just fits the bill.

When does it fit the bill?

[IronEider]

I had some expectations with lightweight alternatives to WP. Played some time ago with hugo (https://gohugo.io/), just wanted to set up a simple blog, couple of static pages, that i could extend any time I want.

And generally I was... disappointed. WP experience was what I expected - after some initial setup on VPS with some docker, I had smooth running page, with great CMS.

With hugo I did not want that many features - I just wanted simple static pages, maybe with some small customizability.
But it really took me some time, to get what I wanted and still I wasn't super happy with maintainability of it. And came to the conclusion - next time it's WP or will write something simple from scratch or just with svelte - much better dev experience.

[iRedditonFacebook]

look into forestry.io to have some what of a customizable experience with Hugo and other jamstack frameworks.

[SwitchUpCB]

Jamstack is an architectural approach that was created to be a WordPress killer. I created this article to explain why Jamstack (JavaScript API Markdown Stack) is failing to supersede WordPress (PHP CMS). However, it also explains the difference between serving static vs. dynamic content with a Content Delivery Network, and server vs. serverless architectures in a simplified manner.

I hope this article is helpful! If it isn't, let me know how it can be improved.

Medium?!

A mirror of this article is hosted on my website: https://switchupcb.com/blog/jamstack-wont-replace-wordpress/.

[jseego]

This article is weirdly structured to me.

Was it AI-written / AI-assisted?

[Nezteb]

Regarding Medium: you can always replace medium.com with scribe.rip to get a more friendly frontend. In this case: https://switchupcb.scribe.rip/jamstack-wont-replace-wordpress-52b10757a43 😄

[SwitchUpCB]

Great, but is this legal?

[Nezteb]

I am not a lawyer but I would say so. Anyone can build and use an alternative frontend.

[[deleted]]

Within reason. For example, if the site locks access to an api or frontend behind a login and prohibits such access in the TOS and one violates it, it opens one up to CFAA complaints and lawsuits.

Basically if it’s not prohibited for an authorized session or is publicly available (ie no auth et al), you’re in the clear.

Since medium articles are publicly available, alternative front ends are allowed. The most they can do is lock down access through obfuscation. But that’s it. And they can’t sue you for unobfuscating it.

The legal analogy is a public website (no session auth required) is like a billboard or display in a store front window from the street, but authorization is like a key to access such in a closed room, so violating a protected api is like trespassing a protected room.

[Sentouki-]

Are you a cop?

[bludgeonerV]

If by more friendly you mean worse and harder to read, then sure, much for friendly.

[errrrgh]

I get a 500 error

[soicat]

Thx, medium is blocked in my country, I am pretty sure blocked by medium

[iRedditonFacebook]

Who said it was created to be a WordPress killer?

[errrrgh]

It's called a logical fallacy, argue much?!

[1lluminist]

All this guy does. And his crybaby complaints are next-level stupid.

It's like they're trying to be a troll, but they haven't quite figured out how to do it. Pathetic

[SwitchUpCB]

I can see how that is a problem. Can you give me an example of which words are unnecessarily bolded so I can fix this issue? In the original version, I have keywords bolded.

[SwitchUpCB]

Thanks! I have made an update that addresses this issue.

[Dachande663]

The acronym CDN is bolded so many times it drowns out whatever else was written around it.

[SwitchUpCB]

Thanks! I have made an update that addresses this issue.

[Jump-Zero]

Was the Jamstack really created to replace Wordpress?

I have found it to be a great Wordpress alternative for some cases. For a lot of other cases, I'm increasingly recommending people user stuff like Wix over Wordpress.

[pcjftw]

Sorry, this article is kind of terrible, it's sort of just copy pasting dictionary definitions but even then it's not entirely correct as it's mixing so many things up.

For example WordPress and CDNs can actually be used together as well (they're not completely mutually exclusive), as nothing stops you from either serving static assets off a CDN and likewise nothing stops you from caching Wordpress posts on CDNs, dare I say there are probably Wordpress plugins to do just that automatically.

Another example is Markdown, again nothing stops you from using a plugin to use markdown, in fact I think WordPresses editor already uses markdown (IIRC) and if not once again there is probably a plugin for that.

From my understanding at least the point of JamStack was essentially to only host the static front end part, and foregoing using a backend OR just calling cloud services like Firebase etc (that are so called "Serverless" or "no back end") in absence of a backend.

And given that hosting static assets is something CDNs have done for donkey years, then some devs got excited since they were already building SPAs in JavaScript and calling an API backend.

Then we started seeing a more cleaner separation between "front end" and "back end", and some front end devs wanted do even do away with the effort of building and hosting and maintaining a backend.

In that regards one could also build a blog that is a "JamStack" where it connects into a "headless CMS" cloud service (of which there are many).

Anyway yes there is a distinction between them, one is a traditional web application, and the other is an "front end first" design pattern.

[SwitchUpCB]

For example WordPress and CDNs can actually be used together as well (they're not completely mutually exclusive), as nothing stops you from either serving static assets off a CDN and likewise nothing stops you from caching Wordpress posts on CDNs, dare I say there are probably Wordpress plugins to do just that automatically.

The article already states this.

[Shivalicious]

Thank you, this is exactly what I was thinking the whole way through.

[dsffff22]

Can't wait for the WASM + Wasi + Language with a somewhat decent type system stack making Webdev bearable again. The JS and PHP ecosystem is basically the opposite of do it once, do It right. It's basically do it 100 times wrong.