As someone that develops Wordpress and Jamstack sites for a living (among other things like apps / devops), this is silly. Debating Wordpress versus Jamstack is like comparing apples to oranges. I use Gatsby + Contentful (or other APIs, like a Headless Wordpress setup) for some situations, and I use Wordpress for many companies as well. Small businesses are not going to hire a designer for PDF designs and then hire a developer to build a Gatsby site, and relearn using a CMS like Contentful instead of Wordpress. Not going to happen. For more sophisticated clients, or for building static sites myself, I always use Gatsby. These type of clients have a higher budget, and can pay for a designer and developer to build the site properly and deal with a more sophisticated deployment architecture.<p>Wordpress is not going away. As long as you don't have to code to use Wordpress, it will be easier and far more accessible for people that don't have a lot of money for a website to hire a web designer (lower skill, lower pay than developer).<p>Gatsby or another Jamstack client could build themes that don't require coding, similar to Wordpress, but I don't see it happening. Webflow is sort of doing that now by allowing designers to build websites without coding.<p>Ultimately, the debate is silly because Wordpress and Jamstack have two different use cases. Wordpress will probably become less popular for big companies, but it will still be very popular for your average small to mid-sized business.
Anecdata:<p>I have semi-recently converted a couple of Wordpress and also Docuwiki sites to static sites. First with Hugo, then converted again from Hugo -> Jekyll.<p>I could not be happier with the results (...with Jekyll anyway, less so with Hugo). And there is no npm.<p>The biggest problem for me was mentioned in the article - security. It felt like I was frequently having to babysit updates in Dokuwiki and Wordpress. Both of the update procedures felt precarious and <i>dangerous</i> - more than once they'd fail to update and hose something on the server and I'd need to go in with a SFTP client or SSH and try to rectify whatever the hell happened. I grew to fear the updates and started to procrastinate doing them which was a warning sign. Perhaps they are perfect and flawless these days?<p>And even when I had updated there was always this lingering feeling that there was some unknown/unpatched exploit or I was 12 hours too late patching and so someone was "inside" my wordpress running a spam/phishing operation without me knowing (happened to me, but perhaps 15 years ago now and was due to the hosting provider so not really relevant... I only found out about that one when a victim of the phishing operation did a whois on the domain and sent me threatening messages. Nice.)<p>These sites that were on Wordpress/dokuwiki didn't even need to be "dynamic" anyway - they just needed to serve content and provide a simple way for people to edit the content. Github pages does a <i>great</i> job for this - non-tech users just use the in-browser editor and if they accidentally delete something there is the git changelog. The time "lost" to do a one-time compilation of the site is totally paid back by the near instantaneous loading time compared to the bloated feel of the previous sites waiting for PHP+MySQL to do its thing on some VPS or shared host (I did not have a CDN).
FYI: Netlify has a trademark on JAMSTACK and strictly controls it. They have a very weak profitability model and over 120 million dollars of early Series VC raises.<p>Netlify is a company working hard to get lots of people locked into their companies ecosystem. This is a very bad thing for the open web.
I don’t want to use npm at all. Hundreds of megabytes of packages and I don’t know what they all do. WordPress I can run with a few minimal packages from my OS/distribution and then use the built in update mechanism for WordPress itself.
Mullenweg is right. Wordpress is a great content management system. From a content writer's perspective, it is perhaps the best way to write and publish content. And it does offer a simple, integrated solution.<p>But Biilmann is also right. The Javascript world (React, Vue, the npm ecosystem, ES6/7+), modularized services like Stripe, Algolia, etc, plus eg Git, have passed the Wordpress development ecosystem by.<p>Wordpress needs a bridge to modern development, so people can get the best of both worlds. That's how we see Gatsby, so we built a source plugin to import content, built Gatsby Cloud to do live content previews, created incremental builds to match the instant content go-live experience.<p>There's a great quote from Jason Bahl, the maintainer of WPGraphQL, on this: "I don’t see Jamstack competing against WordPress. This isn’t a zero sum game. If the Gatsby + WordPress experience can allow users to use the best CMS in the world while using modern dev tooling, it’s a win all around.”<p><a href="https://wptavern.com/matt-mullenweg-and-jamstack-community-square-off-making-long-term-bets-on-the-predominant-architecture-for-the-web" rel="nofollow">https://wptavern.com/matt-mullenweg-and-jamstack-community-s...</a>
I don't like WordPress, but Jamstack will never overtake WordPress adoption quite simply because Jamstack is too complicated.<p>In particular, it will never find an audience among non-technical users which is a very different audience from technical users who often think only of their own likes and needs.<p>If you don't like WordPress, there are more modern CMS apps with modern coding practices (often written in PHP). They aren't part of the Jamstack and but are often much simpler to deploy.
I simply can’t recommend a self-hosted Wordpress install for most users.<p>The vast majority of users that WP caters to are better served by Facebook Pages, Wix, Squarespace and Webflow.<p>Large and high traffic sites aren’t a great fit for WP either as the codebase was never meant for scalability and still maintains a painful developer expierence.<p>There are plenty of options, “JAMStack” included, that are still a much better fit.
Wordpress is fine if you're using wordpress.com edit: not .org (though I usually push webflow).<p>Hosting it yourself is a mistake. Not because it's inherently insecure (the base install isn't) but because no one can control themselves with plugins.<p>There's an entire cottage industry revolving around wpscan and securing/popping the millions of poorly secured wordpress instances floating around.
I use netlify and will never go back to wordpress. Enterprise devs are also focused on jamstack so the shiny new stuff will start there. That doesn't mean that wordpress isn't needed but its plugin features may also be it's greatest strength and weakness.
What's the average use case for WP these days?<p>Shopify has probably eaten all the WP ecommerce sites.<p>Blogging has probably moved to Medium, Substack, static sites, etc.
> Even rebuilding sites in Jamstack harkens [sic] back to the Movable Type days, where the bigger your site gets, the slower it is to rebuild or update templates."<p>Oh I remember that. But that was before the era of SSD and Multicore CPU. And Echoing all the other comments, the two system ( at its current form ) aren't even targeting the same market.
Jamstack is nice locally but doesn’t have a solid solution to something simple like comments.
WordPress is horrid to develop with locally but can do almost anything.<p>Choose your poison.
Wordpress or JAMstack? Why not do both?<p>I did... as an experiment for my blog:
<a href="https://www.louiechristie.com/blog/" rel="nofollow">https://www.louiechristie.com/blog/</a><p>The secret sauce is <a href="https://github.com/henrikwirth/gatsby-starter-wordpress-twenty-twenty" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/henrikwirth/gatsby-starter-wordpress-twen...</a>
I've been a WP developer for more than 10 years and have had enough.<p>I'm doing what I can to persuade clients that WP isn't the only solution, and that CMS's like Statamic and frameworks like Laravel can be a viable and cost effective solution.