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WordPress Market Share Declines, WordPress 6.0 Out, More WordPress.com Pricing Changes 🗞️ June 2022 WordPress News w/ CodeinWP

📆  This is the June 2022 edition of “This Month in WordPress with CodeinWP.” 

Hey, WordPress fans. We are back with you sharing the latest WordPress news that happened over the last month.

The biggest bit of news was the release of WordPress 6.0, which brings a number of enhancements to the Site Editor and full site editing experience, among other tweaks to the block editor and beyond.

Beyond that, WordPress’ market share dipped for the first time in its history(!), prompting furious debate.

Are the first two pieces of news connected? You can argue about it in the comments section!

Keep reading for all the WordPress news from June 2022.

June 2022 WordPress News with CodeinWP

WordPress 6.0 release

In the biggest news this month, WordPress 6.0 was officially released on May 24.

WordPress 6.0 is a major release that brings a number of new features, mostly focused on the Gutenberg project.

First off, WordPress 6.0 builds on the Site Editor experience that was released in WordPress 5.9. You’ll get a number of new options for controlling templates and styles, but only in themes that are specifically block-enabled (which probably doesn’t apply to your theme at this point, sorry).

You’ll also get new theme blocks to use in your templates, such as a post comments form and comments loop.

WordPress 6.0 also brings a bigger focus to block patterns, including making it easier to browse and insert patterns via a new pattern library interface.

It’s not all full site editing, though. There are also some enhancements to the regular editing experience. For example, you can now more easily select text across multiple paragraph blocks, which was a limitation I always found annoying in the past.

Other small but notable improvements include the following:

  • Easier spacing control in the Gallery block.
  • More control over the Columns block.
  • Option to select multiple blocks in List View by using Shift + Click.

You can also lock blocks, which restricts users from moving or deleting that block.

If you want to learn about all the new features, check out the Themeisle guide to WordPress 6.0.

Again, WordPress 6.0 is a major release, which means it’s fine to wait a bit to update. Personally, I recommend waiting until at least the first patch, which gives the core team time to fix any potentially frustrating issues.

WordPress 6.0

The WordPress market share declines

If you’ve been enjoying the ride in the stock market these past couple of months, here’s another bit of red for you:

For the first time in WordPress’ entire history, its market share went down…at least according to W3Techs*.

*W3Techs works by analyzing the top 10 million websites according to Alexa and Tranco. So it’s not analyzing the “entire internet,” but it’s pretty dang close, as 10 million websites seem to be a large enough sample.

The decline started from March 2022 to April 2022, when WordPress dropped from 43.3% market share to 43.0% market share.

As of mid-May 2022, WordPress has further dropped to 42.9%.

Here’s a table showing the last few months, along with Squarespace and Wix:

WordPress market share
Month WordPress Overall Usage Wix Usage Squarespace Usage
1 Nov 2021 42.8% 1.8% 1.8%
1 Dec 2021 43.0% 1.9% 1.8%
1 Jan 2022 43.2% 1.9% 1.8%
1 Feb 2022 43.3% 1.9% 1.8%
1 March 2022 43.3% 2.0% 1.8%
1 April 2022 43.0% 2.2% 2.0%
1 May 2022 43.0% 2.3% 2.0%
27 May 2022 42.9% 2.3% 2.0%

The obvious question here is – why?

Well, there are plenty of potential theories:

  • The Gutenberg project is driving away core WordPress users because it’s “ruining WordPress.”
  • The Gutenberg project isn’t being added fast enough because it’s the “savior of WordPress.” Yes – you’ll see both of these arguments.
  • Other content management systems like Craft CMS offer a more attractive alternative to WordPress.
  • Casual users would rather use a simple website builder like Wix or Squarespace. There does seem to be some data to support this, as both Squarespace and Wix expanded their usage in the same time period.
  • It’s just a random blip in the data or how W3Techs is calculating things, and WordPress’ dominance will continue soon.
  • …your favorite pet cause is either ruining WordPress or not getting the focus it needs to save WordPress.

Where does the truth lie? Well, I personally have no idea, though it seems like Wix and Squarespace are playing the biggest role in it (at least according to W3Techs data). If WordPress is decreasing, that means something else needs to be increasing. And according to the data, that seems to be Squarespace and Wix.

Joost de Valk of Yoast SEO fame was the first one to draw attention to this in his post, WordPress’ market share is shrinking. He posits a few potential causes, such as Wix and Squarespace improving on their performance and SEO, as well as WordPress not offering an easy enough site-building experience.

For some other perspectives, there are a ton of comments in this WP Tavern post on the subject.

Since it’s only been a couple of months, I think it’s too early to be ringing any alarm bells. It could be something as simple as W3Techs changing something in its system that led to a small difference in the calculations.

However, if these trends continue, I’m sure there will be a lot more focus on what’s causing the drop.

Interestingly, if you look at CMS market share instead of overall usage, WordPress’ market share has actually been declining since November 2021 (though it did have a jump in February 2022).

WordPress.com changes its pricing plans…again

In last month’s news roundup, we talked about how WordPress.com made big changes to its pricing plans.

As part of that, we mentioned how some users were upset because it would now cost more to use a custom domain (though they’d also gain the ability to install custom themes and plugins).

To respond to those upset users, WordPress.com has just changed its plans again, releasing a brand-new Starter plan that costs $5 per month.

The WordPress.com Pro plan stays exactly how it was at $15 per month. But now, the new WordPress.com Starter plan gives you the ability to use a custom domain name along with a few other features for a much cheaper price. Those other features are:

  • The option to collect payments using the built-in Stripe/PayPal blocks.
  • The ability to add Google Analytics.

However, the Starter plan does not allow you to install themes and plugins.

As a more important limitation, the Starter plan also does not remove the WordPress.com ads, which is something that the paid plans used to do.

Personally, I don’t see a ton of value in this new plan because I think you’re better off paying the extra $10 to remove ads and install your own plugins/themes. However, there does seem to be a sizable contingent of people who literally just want to use a custom domain name, so this plan should make them happy.

Additionally, if you’re on one of the older plans, you’re still grandfathered into the terms of your existing plan, so you don’t really need to think about any of this unless you plan to create a new site.

For a more in-depth look at WordPress.com, including their pricing plans, check out our WordPress.com review.

WordPress.com pricing changes again

You may also be interested in:

WooCommerce is testing its custom order tables

A few months back, I talked about how WooCommerce is working on using custom order tables in the near future, which should offer big performance improvements for a lot of stores (especially large ones).

Well, WooCommerce is now nearing the point of having a minimum viable product, and they’ve put out a request for developers to test it. They’re looking to discover two things:

  • Any bugs or major issues.
  • How much time and server resources the migration takes for different stores and environments.

This is not ready for prime time yet, and you should not use it on a live store.

However, if you’re willing to test it out on your staging or development site, you can help the WooCommerce team work out any bugs and improve the migration process.

To learn more, check out the WooCommerce post here.

A native WordPress page builder…without WordPress?

This isn’t news so much as a really neat concept project.

Munir Kamal has created an online WordPress page builder app that works without WordPress. You can use the builder app to create your own designs using patterns from the WordPress.org library, and then export those designs as patterns that you can easily use in the block editor.

Again, this is really more of a concept project for Munir at this stage. However, it is a pretty dang neat concept and shows some interesting ways in which you can use the block editor.

If you want to check it out, click here to visit the Gutenberg Hub Builder.

In general, Munir is doing a lot of really interesting things with blocks. For example, he also created the Gutenberg Forms plugin, which offered a full-service form builder powered by blocks. Note – the plugin has since been acquired by a different developer.

Ulysses improves its WordPress publishing experience

Here’s a neat bit of news for fans of Ulysses, a popular macOS writing app.

Ulysses version 26, released on May 5, 2022, brings a new integration that lets you publish posts using the WordPress REST API.

While you could still publish posts to WordPress in the past, the direct REST API implementation offers a simpler solution.

If you want to learn more, you can check out this WP Tavern Post.

That sums up our June 2022 WordPress news roundup. Anything we missed?

Don’t forget to join our crash course on speeding up your WordPress site. Learn more below:

 

Layout and presentation by Karol K.

Colin Newcomer

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