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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. Today's episode features a segment from Matt's interview with Remkus de Vries of Within WordPress. Remkus stopped by to talk about the impact AI may or may not be having on the WordPress market share and what the future holds for the open source platform. Now you can catch the entire interview over on our WP Minute Plus channel. Visit the WPMinute.com for all the details.
Matt (00:30)
And I want to get your take on something that I've been super critical of over the last couple of months. And of course
Remkus (00:36)
Yep, right.
Matt (00:37)
that and and of course that is, well, of course, but through the lens of AI and everyone sort of jumping to new tools and and fancy new CMSs and headless CMSs and static sites. There's been this sort of wave of people going, you know what? I'm done with WordPress.
It ain't catching up. I'm gone. What's your take on that? Do you do you think that people are just chasing a shiny new object? Or are are we really feeling pressures of a better product, whatever that is, somewhere else?
Remkus (01:11)
that's a gr that's a great question. I think it's a good one to ask because first of all, everything that you and I see is inside a very, very tiny bubble. And that bubble is in no way reflective of the actual state. And for all the metrics that we have used to gauge how large the larger bubble is, meaning whether we're looking at WordPress's market share or
How much money is going through the WordPress economy, all those types of metrics and ideas and thoughts about that? We have to start with understanding that those have always been an assumption. We have no clue. So what I see happening is we are entering the phase where AI is sort of.
I wouldn't call it maturing, but maturing enough that it can start to replace some of the core stuff people working with WordPress do. And if you are someone who is close to being somebody who does indeed chase the new shiny object, that's an easy pull away from the core of what WordPress is. But
In my opinion, you're missing a step. First of all, you haven't educated yourself on what WordPress actually allows you to do. You haven't educated yourself on the possibilities that new shiny toy, whatever it's not a toy, but that new shiny thing allows you to do inside of WordPress, with WordPress, in many different ways.
And you're basically going from the assumption that, hey, I see something new, I'm going to chase that. Therefore, if I see others do it, or I see market share of any of the other assumptions we've seen, take a plummet, or even and it's not a plummet, like it's it's it's very incremental. and then draw huge and big conclusions from that, you are you're just not being honest with the data. And it starts with n never ever have has that data been
solid enough to identify as solid data, but it's the best version we had, certainly if you look if we look at market share and stuff. If you look at the same data with the same lens, you don't see other CMSs making great strides. It it's really not. It's going in the same pace. My contention is that what we're seeing is a shift from the bottom of the market, and maybe that's in huge numbers.
But the bottom of the market is reaching the point where it makes sense for them to jump onto the AI that generates my site type mentality. And whether that's pushed towards a markdown file system like EmDash from Cloudflare, or that's Astro itself, or any other version of that, sure, that will happen and that is happening. people have been wanting to shit on WordPress since the moment we said, hey, we're no longer a blog.
and you know, there's fair points in that in that process of of not liking WordPress. I I get it, but it also means you haven't really dived into what WordPress actually does and how it allows you. So I think we're very much seeing that happen. and on the other end, and I I I think that is also the maturing not just of AI in WordPress, but WordPress itself is is hella maturing mo momentarily.
It allows us to use WordPress in many, many different types of ways than just presenting a site. And I think what we're seeing is a colliding of those two types of things happening at the same time. I have no data to back it up, so again, it's it's it's my opinion. It's my digestion of what I see happening, the types of questions I see asked and answered left and right in all the various
Slack Teams, forums, Reddit, Reddit's not a good example. Whatever happens on Reddit, I whatever. But I think we're very much moving into a market where we have to focus on the WordPress agency developer freelancer side side of things. We have to focus on what makes us special.