WordPress.com’s owner launched a tracker for sites leaving WP Engine.
WordPress.com’s owner launched a tracker for sites leaving WP Engine.
As spotted by @DuaneStorey on X, the “WP Engine Tracker” says more than 16,000 sites stopped using WP Engine since late September, which is when WordPress.com parent company Automattic started its public campaign against the third-party hosting service. Meanwhile, Automattic’s response to WP Engine’...
WP had a time, but there are a ton of better options now.
The WP plugin gatekeeping is terrible, it lacks cyclical review which allows abandoned plugins to be converted to malware; its target audience is people who have no business running their own internets and have no idea what updates are, thus scattering the landscape with outdated WP installs ripe for conversion into botnets; it uses an unreasonable amount of resources, primarily due to encouraging users to install every plugin the can find; and finally, who the hell is Dolly?
To be fair, I’d move away from Wordpress entirely. So many better options out there without tyrannical leadership.
Can you recommend a few?
I’d say check out this site: https://selfh.st/apps/?tag=Blog
There’s a number on there. I’ve personally used Grav, I hear ghost and Hugo are good. They’re more limited, but they’re much faster and more secure. As someone who had to support Wordpress blogs for years, the amount of security issues on that thing always made me stay far from it for any thing personal.
There isn't a true replacement for Wordpress because of the sheer availability of plugins it has.
But for simple sites like blogs and personal sites Grav CMS is one I've used, and it gives you a web admin panel similar to Wordpress, so the learning curve isn't too bad.
Drupal also gets mentioned a lot as a replacement.
There are also static site generators like Hugo, but those require learning a lot about the specific one you use, and are pretty complex to use, and if you need non-static content like a web form or something it can add a lot of complexity to your whole setup.
https://ghost.org/ is one of them.
Is there alternative for dynamic multipage shop site?
Meanwhile, Automattic’s response to WP Engine’s lawsuit claimed the company “failed to plausibly allege specific financial harm.”
The footer says the site is operated by Automattic.
The very second website in the file they use to track recently-moved websites uses substack (now).