After seeing WordPress top the most dreaded platform on Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey for two years in a row ( 2019 and 2020 ), a few weeks ago we explored why developers hate using the CMS .

Interestingly enough, we ended up getting some impassioned responses from developers who love WordPress. Just visit some of the many Quora and Reddit threads about the CMS and you’ll find die-hard WordPress haters and lovers battling it out.

We decided to dig deeper into this story. What’s actually fueling this rift within the developer community and what could WordPress do to appease Stack Overflow respondents?

Seeing as we actually use WordPress here at TNW, we started by having a chat with a developer from our very own team.

What WordPress fans love about the CMS: It’s built for everyone

When WordPress started out in 2003, it was built to help bloggers and small businesses develop websites without the need for coding skills. Rather than having to build a site from scratch or hire an expensive agency, these individuals and small teams could simply choose from a number of beautifully designed ‘theme’ templates, customize, and go.

The success of this much simpler and more accessible model held promise for users who wanted to spread their reach. There are now over 4,000 themes to choose from.

Along with that came the first plug-ins so users could customize their site even more with new options to optimize SEO, connect to social, integrate with newsletters, and more. The number of plug-ins ballooned to over 50,000 options.

“From an end user/client perspective, WordPress offers a low learning curve, relative ease of use, and a plugin ecosystem which can enable people and businesses of all skill levels to create high quality sites and applications, often without needing to hire developers,” said Ronan O’Leary, Senior Web Developer at TNW.

Having worked with WordPress over the course of his 10-year career as a web developer, he said:

For him, one of the great things about WordPress is that it’s open source and has an extremely large market share, so there’s a very good chance that a large number of devs have experience in dealing with the platform. This also means that solutions to immediate issues are generally a quick Google away.

“It’s very flexible as it’s grown from being a blog platform to a more rounded, fully featured, and extendable CMS,” O’Leary said.

The problem: It’s become a victim of its own success

The accessibility WordPress was built to offer may just be the cause of the divide we now see within the developer community. With 64 million users across the globe, O’Leary believes:

The problem is, with the amount of sites that are run on WordPress, the majority of them will be running on the traditional way of doing things, making it difficult to introduce really far reaching updates without alienating a large group of clients. With the constant and high speed rate of innovation in the dev community, O’Leary expects the gap between old and new technology to only get wider:

Furthermore, while having such an open system has its upsides, it also means there isn’t a defined standard for code or code quality. O’Leary said this often leads to headaches where solutions need to be crafted to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of a given theme:

So can WordPress actually keep the accessibility its fans love while modernizing its offering for frustrated devs?

If you read our previous article, you’ll remember Dominik Angerer, CEO of headless CMS platform Storyblok, shared some of the difficulties he and his cofounder faced when working with traditional CMS systems.

Catching up with him again, he shared that he believes most legacy systems (including WordPress, Squarespace, Drupal and others) are now transitioning towards a headless approach. In his view, this will really help them modernize their offering for today’s users:

Introducing new concepts to a widely distributed solution, such as WordPress, takes a long time as it’s not just the core that has to change but also the plugin ecosystem, approach to themes, and even custom plugins that are affected by those changes. Whilst WordPress has made a huge push towards the adoption of a new editor experience called “Gutenberg” — built on the back of React — it’s fair to say there has been a somewhat mixed, even polarized reaction to it.

“If it were my call, I think fully splitting the legacy WordPress infrastructure from new developments would be a great start,” said O’Leary.

“A legacy WordPress could still exist, enabling existing sites to be maintained with the traditional implementation and without needing to adopt an approach which doesn’t suit all use cases. Ideally, there could be a newer, more headless-centric version based around modern approaches (headless/jamstack frontends) and without the clutter or bloat that can often come with themes.”

“While this is somewhat simplistic to say, there are already in fact, forks of the WordPress core specifically excluding Gutenberg and sticking to the traditional approach. Equally, more and more companies, agencies, devs etc… are using the platform in tandem with the likes of Next.js/Nuxt.js. Or even using WordPress as an API interface/backend.”

There are a lot of options to consider but with so many faithful users wanting more functionality, and added market pressure, there’s no doubt WordPress will be introducing some interesting updates in the years to come. According to O’Leary:

From our worst month to our best: 4 lessons my startup learned the hard way

The pandemic was incredibly difficult for many startups , and mine was one of them. As restrictions started, our operations fell by a whopping 81% .

This might not be that surprising, seeing that we work in recruitment. But what might be a surprise is that we made it through this difficult patch and are growing again.

So let me share my learnings and how we got back onto the growth path with a new, faster, and more aggressive mindset.

Before we dive in, let me give you a bit of background. My startup Globalwork was founded in Colombia and operates across Latin America. Our purpose is to build trusting relationships between companies and their talent through background checks, information verification of their applicants, and home interviews.

When we started out in 2017 we worked with medium-sized companies, but over time we’ve begun partnering with large corporations in the region. We built a very solid information platform and a network of 200 professionals in psychology and social work throughout the region to conduct the best possible socioeconomic interviews.

Things were going great. The number of processes asked by our clients was growing 20% month by month… until the pandemic hit.

In Colombia, where we used to have our hand in 5000 hiring processes every quarter, the first months were wracked by uncertainty. Companies didn’t dare to hire new staff, many had to lay off a large part of their team (2.4 million job positions were lost and it’s estimated that Colombia went back 10 years in this regard ) and clung to their jobs, so there was no turnover.

So in April 2020, our operations dropped by 81% — our absolute worst month. But only a year later, in March 2021, we had our best month ever, even compared with the b (before covid) era!

I won’t claim that we have some magical solution or that all our decisions were right or fully informed. And I won’t deny the importance that the economic reactivation had on our indicators.

Instead, the truth is simply that we acquired experience during tough times, whose value we’re only now beginning to understand. But we’re using it to define good practices that are now part of who we are and I believe it can be useful for you as well.

1. If to ‘do or not to do’ is the dilemma, always do

The common opinion among our clients and colleagues, even our own opinion, was that the pandemic was going to last a couple of months. We could see how many companies were left to wait and barely reacted when weeks had passed.

We, on the other hand, spent the first weekend of lockdown in a hackathon, building the MVP of the product that I’ll tell you about later on.

A few weeks before, by chance, we had read this great article on the need to start playing offense. I found it to be incredibly important to jump-start our shift into a faster and more aggressive mindset.

2. Take the time to know your customers

As I said, we work in recruitment, which connects us directly with human resources. By calling our clients we discovered that many of them were carrying a heavy burden, as they had to fire people, channel the uncertainty and fear of employees, issue the disabilities of contagions, and even deal with the mourning of employees who lost loved ones.

The emotional burden and uncertainty were overwhelming the companies’ workforces. By putting ourselves in the shoes of our customers, we knew we had a huge possibility on our hands, not to sell more, but to connect at a human level with them.

This gave us incredible feedback on what people really needed and how we could fulfill those needs, but more on that a bit further down.

3. Be aware of your resources

My team has a network of 200 professionals in psychology and social work who conducted our home interviews. But when no one is hiring, and on top of that, if they aren’t even allowed to enter anyone’s home, what could we do with them?

Our decision was to assign psychologists and social workers to what they do best: listening and helping others.

Having previously identified the needs of the companies we worked with, we launched a completely free emotional wellness platform, in which 50 of our collaborators volunteered to participate.

The dynamic was simple: if anyone, whether they were employees of our clients or not, felt emotionally unwell, they could contact us through a landing page and schedule an appointment with one of our professionals.

With this campaign, we made a quick communication plan with our database and media and from one week to the next our website visits doubled, we were published in national media, and weekly we received around 100 requests for emotional accompaniment during three months.

As time went by, this platform became more sophisticated with people analytics, and we started to offer it to companies through a monthly fee so that they could open a space for empathic and professional listening to their teams and obtain valuable information about emotions in their organization.

4. Know the needs of the industries

You spend all day thinking how to make your product better. It is highly likely that you will end up believing that you are the best thing in the world and that the market needs you. Not even close.

While we were trying to sell a service that didn’t have a big demand because of the uncertainty in society, a client of ours, one of the most important companies in Colombia told us: “We are going to send 500 people to permanent remote work and we need a company that makes sure they have the optimal conditions for that. Would you be interested in checking this?”

So, again, we made specific changes in the technology we had already developed, and we assigned our entire logistics network of psychologists and social workers to this new service that implied minimal modifications to the process, but let us keep moving at first, and then, to building a profitable line of business.

These pivots that we had to make at full speed changed our own vision of Globalwork: they showed us that we are not only a background checks and information verification company, but mainly a logistics company that can support HR areas in a wide range of needs.

We now have two new lines of business, emotional wellbeing and verification of remote work conditions, which represent 7% and 6% of our current operation, respectively.

In addition, this dynamic of constant experimentation allowed us to go back to grow 20% every month and prepared us for the economic recovery, strengthening the relationship with our clients to a level we did not expect and teaching us to optimize our commercial processes, which reduced our sales cycles from 4-5 months to 2-3 months.

I don’t want to fall into the cliché of saying that change is the best thing in the world, because it isn’t.

It can be terrifying and super destructive. But it’s something you can’t control. Just remember the inertia law: objects tend to maintain their state, either at rest or in motion. If you are barely moving, any obstacle will stop you easily. If you are moving fast, of course you can be deviated and even derailed, but your inertia will keep you in motion.

Metrics can drive your growth — as long as you’re looking at the right ones

Working in a startup , regardless of your position, requires close attention to data — there’s just no way around it. So if I could give you just one piece of advice, it would be to learn how to effectively analyze these numbers and metrics.

I’ve been working at Orcas for the past four and a half years. Orcas is an Education Technology platform that gives tutors access to lesson plans and provides students with free assessments. Tutors can offer their 1-to-1 sessions and 1-to-many courses both online or in-person and Orcas provides them with discovery, booking, scheduling, in-app communication, and video-conferencing tools.

Every year, our CEO would gather the whole team and tell us about the target for the coming period, and for us, it almost always seemed impossible to reach. One of these meetings was even called “Mission Impossible.” As the Chief Growth Officer, I felt a lot of pressure and had so many thoughts running through my mind: “How will we reach our goals? What do we need to make this happen?”

However, I quickly realized that the only way we’d get there is by looking at the numbers closely, understanding where we are and which numbers to work on.

The real trick though is not looking at any number or all the numbers, it’s looking at the right data . The metric that will make the difference.

Last year, after one of those yearly growth meetings, we needed to achieve a 4x growth year over year in new customer sales; which at the time seemed very challenging.

But by using the correct data and a properly thought-out strategy, nothing is impossible. I was able to achieve the required growth by following the steps below:

In our case, we decided to focus on the number of people who search daily on our app. We know that by increasing this number, the top of our funnel will increase and generate more users who place a request on a daily basis and therefore increase our sales — which is what we’re ultimately aiming for.

There was a catch, though: we had to do that while decreasing our Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), so we couldn’t throw money at the problem and spend more on ads to reach our goal.

We had to look at all the possible ways we can acquire new customers. One thing that we were confident in, was Facebook Ads. Unfortunately, we couldn’t only rely on ads because of our budget and how it could impact our CAC, so we had to find other ways.

Here’s what we’ve done:

This growth wouldn’t have been possible if we didn’t choose the right metric to monitor closely and experiment often.

I’d look at the number of searchers on an hourly basis and set a weekly growth goal. We’d try different combinations of timings, channels, and messages to see what’s working and what makes users search. We were laser-focused on increasing that number that we even doubled the efforts on slow days.

Not everything we tried worked though… especially when it came to referrals.

As part of our plan to decrease our CAC, we wanted to capitalize on our already existing customers to become our brand ambassadors and get us more customers for a significantly lower cost (especially after conducting a survey with them and discovering that 60% of our customers are using the app because someone they trust told them about it).

We thought we hit the jackpot! We decided to incentivize our customers to recommend us more aggressively to their friends. They would then give their friends a code to use while booking their sessions to get a discount. Alongside that, they’d receive a monetary reward in return for each person who uses their code.

A win-win situation that would work wonders, or so we thought.

Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned, our satisfied users didn’t want to use their code. They didn’t want to seem like they were recommending us to benefit from their friends, after all, we are a trust business.

Our users are not buying goods or taking one short ride, they’re looking for someone who will enter their home, sit with their children and teach them. They need to trust that person and the company that’s providing them with this service.

Understanding this was key to understanding why our happy customers didn’t want to use their referral codes. They don’t want to lose their credibility, they want to give advice to their friends and relatives without it looking like there is something in it for them.

This finding didn’t demotivate us, on the contrary, it gave us a better understanding of our customer behavior. An understanding that will help us do better in the next trial.

Experimentation is an ongoing process and in my opinion the only way we’ll learn and grow. At Orcas, we celebrate failed experiments because they represent newly learned lessons — and I think you should too.