WordPress has officially surpassed powering 30% of the Internet, dominating all other content management systems available to webmasters. With growth trends continuing on a steady incline year-on-year more of the top 10 million websites online are using WordPress than ever before.
With growth comes opportunity, and today there is an entire ecosystem of businesses thriving as a result of WordPress’ internet dominance. From Managed WordPress Hosting cited by Crunchbase as one of the most lucrative, yet underfunded, industries to a plugin library of over 55,000 there seemed no better time to survey the community and see where things stand.
We asked WordPress users ranging from specialty dev agencies and bloggers to enterprise tech leads and CEOs to share with us their biggest headaches in managing and hosting their instances and the results were interesting enough to share.
The Top Three WordPress Pain Points
The biggest challenges WordPress users face go far beyond managing their content and designing their presence on the web. Far beyond. We’re talking issues that can effect entire businesses. In a multiple choice question asking for insights here the top responses were Performance Issues (52%), Security Issues (41%), and Site-breaking Updates (35%).
Site performance is mission critical to businesses optimizing for speed and scale in WordPress, no doubt. Similarly, the prevention and mitigation of security risks demand comprehensive security architectures often times beyond what an internal team can accomplish on their own.
What WordPress Users Would Do to Avoid These Headaches
We had to ask. Just how bad is it? To what depths would WordPress users be willing to dive in order to just not have to deal?
Giving up coffee or vacation time, eating a bug and taking a pay cut all seemed reasonable. We initially threw this question in for some anecdotal evidence, but wow.
Choosing a WordPress Hosting Provider
As the pioneer in the managed WordPress hosting industry, we had to find out more on issues users have with their providers, and why they choose to stay with their current host.
While we were generally pleased with the seemingly low number of respondents who did indicate issues with their provider, the results were still worth noting.
The biggest challenges WordPress users face with their hosting providers are High Expenses (30%), Support Issues (25%), Security Issues (19%), Uptime Problems (18%).
On the other hand, why users choose their host? Excellent Service (42%), Affordable Plans (30%) and Loyalty (19%) all ranked highest.
This part of the survey rings all too true to the Pagely team. These findings largely power our own mission as providers to offer the most flexible and secure solution in hosting, and to never push unnecessary plans on customers or charge for overages (unlike some of our competitors, cough).
Challenges in Self Hosting WordPress
Every day we speak with WordPress users who are unhappy with their self hosting solutions. It’s part of our job to help these people optimize their own teams for what they’re really good at, and leave the other parts to us if it’s a good match. With that, we found these results to be in line with our own assumptions of why it’s hard to self host.
Security monitoring, site updates and improvements, 24/7 service and staff productivity ranked as the highest challenges for self hosts- not much of a surprise.
Biggest Hopes & Dreams for WordPress
At Pagely we’ve long been preaching why WordPress is the best CMS option and why companies should migrate to it, if they aren’t using it already. For this part of the survey we wanted to know what users hope to accomplish with their own WordPress sites this year, and the results illustrate the confidence users have in the CMS quite well.
Users indicated their confidence in WordPress to help them Increase Traffic (64%), Increase Revenue (43%), and to Become More Efficient Online (39%).
I guess we’re preaching to the choir, because we agree WordPress can help with all of these business goals.
Sharing the Love with All WordPress Service Providers
We asked a total of 15 in depth questions on WordPress users pain points that we think could be useful to any service provider in the industry. If you’re interested in seeing the full results as a .PDF fill out the form below and we’d be happy to share.
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