WordPress and the second law of thermodynamics.

I know, I know, this announcement is hardly going to send shockwaves around the web. But in the midst of the Wordpress saga, it’s worth bearing in mind that thousands of website-providing firms and their developers will perhaps now be thinking twice before firing up another Flywheel account. One straw doth not a camel break, and yet I must not be the only person emailing clients to let them know that we may need to move their hosting.

And to where? Because by all accounts it’s not just WP Engine who are in the firing line now. As this list shows, dozens of firms unlucky enough to choose a name starting with ‘WP’ are soon to be in the firing line. As are any using the terms ‘Managed Wordpress’ or even ‘Hosted Wordpress’.

I must admit, I’ve never been a massive fan of Wordpress the CMS. I’ve always used it begrudgingly because clients wanted a known, relatively simple solution. Whenever people have been willing to pay a little bit more I’ve pushed them the way of Squarespace, or more recently, Ghost. The latter I’ve always thought was that little bit too expensive, but it’s actually comparable or cheaper to a managed Wordpress installation, albeit without all the bells and whistles available within the Wordpress ecosystem.

That’s just it though, part of what makes Wordpress attractive, is that you can do anything with it. Want a self-catering holiday booking platform? You have your choice of plugins. Need a customised e-commerce store, there’s no end of options. This commercial ecosystem is what has made Wordpress as popular as it is. Whilst I am not one to defend the morality of private equity firms, surely driving the growth of the platform itself is ‘giving back’, so to speak?

Another threat to Wordpress in my opinion, is the rise of generative AI. Building websites, even complex ones, is getting a whole lot easier. And I really hope that this leads to a greater weakening of lots of tech behemoths, beyond even content management systems. In the age of consolidation, it’s good to see some splintering going on. The law of entropy at work in the world wide web is a wonderful sight.

The long and the short of it is, the next time I get the opportunity to develop a website for someone, I’ll be suggesting we use just about anything other than Wordpress, just in case I have to fork over 8% of my profit margin.