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by blue_cookeh 1236 days ago
Everytime I read something negative about WordPress it's about the developer experience - why is no one focusing on the fact it's actually pretty good for non-technical website owners?
2 comments

Because it is bad for them as well but they don’t have a clue so they don’t nag about it.
What would be better for them? Like, maybe there's something technically better, if everyone switched, but as an individual, what else would you use, that has the same level of accessibility for non-technical people, open sourceness, and wide acceptance that makes it easy to find someone who can work on your stuff, plus one click setup type cloud providers?
Is it really though? What's the alternative for a drag and drop website for non technical people? I haven't found one that works any better.
Wix and Squarespace will happily take their money in exchange for a very nice drag and drop website interface.
That's true, but you're locked to them, if they vanish or decide to terminate your account for some reason, you're pretty much hosed.
Yeah with WordPress you can take your site and migrate it to a different provider. Can't beat that.
Time is money is opportunity cost though. If a proprietary provider is able to get you up and running faster then that's more time you have to spend on other things, like the rest of the business. Let's be real, the chances of getting shutdown if you're not in a grey area is pretty slim - if you are, eg crypto, porn, cannabis; then I'd not use a proprietary provider - what is "beat" is time spent on the product instead of upgrading WordPress plugins.
As someone who is sometimes called to step in and help these non-technical people, I particularly enjoyed the moment when GDPR was implemented.

Non-technical people running wordpress asked me what cookies their website is setting and how to make the sites comply. I asked them on which basis they select and install the plugins they are running and how they know what these plugins are actually doing.

The short of it: they have no idea.