Thread by @noeltock

WordPress has a lot of room to grow at the enterprise level ✨ Last night, I spoke at the WP Enterprise Gap event which was fully packed at #WCEU — all hosted by the amazing and growing agency alliance.

A 🧵 on our opportunities...

We tend to use these WordPress adoption numbers everywhere (such as 43% of the web, etc.). These are numbers to be proud of, but imho not KPIs to lead the way. Let's dig into some of the data behind these figures...

I looked at the new WP sites detected in the last quarter (within the Top 100k of global sites — as this is generally a decent scope for enterprise). I feel this is the closest representation of what is happening "now" in terms of traction...

In this list, you'll find a lot of beautiful websites and great brands such as the ones below. But there's only one problem...

None of these websites are actually on WordPress.
Well, not the main site anyway. Out of these newly detected sites, there's almost a 3x likelihood that WP is instead installed on one of the brand's subdomains.

Going further, almost 1 in 5 of these subdomain detections contain the word "blog" (with other popular subdomain keywords being related to events and careers).

... and this all makes sense. MarTech is very fragmented these days, many sites will use multiple CMS's and tools across the same web property.
In the top 100k, we also see the momentum of WP fading as less new sites are detected year on year...

Which is one of the main reasons as to why the enterprise agency alliance started, to bridge the gap between what we as WP companies and the software are capable of, versus how the market perceives us. My personal recommendations and thoughts were as follows...

WP is notorious for being everything to everyone, this often doesn't work in markets where your competitors are razor-sharp with their messaging and positioning. WP Enterprise suffers from this the most.

💡 We (agencies, hosts, etc.) should pick strategic lines to pursue, whereby we build out (or aggregate) competitive edge. This focus then allows us to band together towards open-source development, ecosystem partnerships, case studies, marketing & sales collateral, etc.

Next up, martech has become incredibly fragmented, every tool or feature becomes its own SaaS/product. The market has moved away from all-in-one suites, to composable stacks.

WordPress has history here...

WP's plugin ecosystem allowed this "unbundling of everything" to flourish a decade ago, empowering website builders to solve for an incredible spectrum of use-cases.

But as we've seen in the last few years, this is not enough anymore...

Buyers and users prefer "integrations" over "plugins". There's nothing wrong with the plugin ecosystem, but we're missing a huge opportunity by not having integrations much closer to core (and optional to install), this would make WP's "connectedness" official then 💡

Example: I find a lot of WordPress/Next.js sites, but even with our 43%, we still don't have something as simple as this? Companies that are much weaker functionally than WP, such as Contentful below, tell a better story to buyers through these partnerships & integrations.

Moving on. Chaining these previous suggestions; strategic verticals, integrations, partnerships... we come to branding — which would help highlight WP's commitment to enterprise in particular.

Ironically, the "cheap" proprietary builders from a decade ago have already moved further ahead than us. Wix's Enterprise site is better than anything we have catering to this level of buyers... wix.com/enterprise

We can create alternative brands as alliances, etc. but that would all be missing the point imho. The foundation needs to extend its branding to enable WordPress to better speak to these parts of the market directly 💡

In summary → We have to achieve escape velocity, breaking away from the things that are holding us back from growing in this new and upcoming market cycle. We have the code and capabilities, but need to go beyond if we want WordPress to succeed in the enterprise 🌌

That's all that fit in a 10 minute talk!

Thank you to @crowdfavorite @XWP @inpsyde @TheCodeDotCo & @humanmadeltd for running the event, and @getpantheon & @wpengine for sponsoring the afterparty 🎉

Follow our companies for the next event at #WCUS 🌅