Cancel

Sarah Gooding

WordPress Opens 2023 Annual Survey

WordPress has launched its 2023 annual survey, which is open to the entire community, including users, site builders, plugin and theme authors, and contributors.

The 2022 survey collected responses from roughly 3,400 people, including approximately 800 contributors, a decline in submissions from previous years. The 2022 survey introduced the Likert scale, a rating scale that quantitatively assesses opinions, attitudes, or behaviors. The total number of questions were reduced, with socio-economic questions mostly removed.

WordPress is still evolving the survey format to get a better understanding of the community’s sentiments and values.

“This year, like last year, the survey has undergone some improvements to the flow and question set,” Automattic-sponsored contributor Dan Soschin said. “A new platform is also being piloted, offering an updated interface, enhanced multi-lingual support, expanded analysis and visualization tools for the results, and more. The new platform also has built-in accessibility and privacy controls, ensuring the survey meets the diverse needs of the WordPress community.”

The 2023 survey takes approximately 5-10 minutes to complete. It collects information on some basic demographics, various community involvements, preferred WordPress editor, how and why you are using WordPress, and more. Several questions allow the community to weigh in on the most frustrating aspects of WordPress, areas that need more attention, and whether or not the current WordPress roadmap reflects respondents’ needs and desires for the future of the project.

In addition to English, the survey is available in nine widely-used languages, which participants can select from a drop-down menu at the top of the page. All the data collected in the survey will be anonymized and WordPress does not associate IP addresses or email addresses with the results.

Category:
9

9 responses to “WordPress Opens 2023 Annual Survey”

  1. The survey was frustrating and synptomatic of what is wrong with WordPress atm.

    I’ve worked at the bottom end of market research and the rate things on a scale questions are useless. They depend hugely on the framing of the question, previous questions or the interviewer (if there is one). And in many cases they miss the real problems entirely

    In this case I’d have liked to express disatisfaction with the current development priorities in core. It’s mad the features being developed for Gutenberg that most don’t want and the huge number of apis and bugs not being addressed

    There was nowhere to express this opinion directly in the survey. And I know many others think similarly

    Create forum topic from comment
    Reply

    • Strongly agree. There are numerous 10 years old tickets but all the attention is given to Gutenberg which was not required by general public but Automattic waned it.
      Also block sites are less customizable by average Joe, PHP templates were easy to understand and modify even by someone with no coding skills while modern JS driven pages are much more complicated.

      Create forum topic from comment
      Reply

      • I strongly agree with this: “Also block sites are less customizable by average Joe, PHP templates were easy to understand and modify even by someone with no coding skills while modern JS driven pages are much more complicated.” It’s a HUGE issue.

        Create forum topic from comment
        Reply

        • I find it almost funny that the idea of creating FSE was to make site editing easier and then we are faced with the reality that any client editing the site with FSE is unthinkable. From the smallest one person business (who would be hopelessly overwhelmed by it) to the largest clients I deal with (around 100 employees). None of them can understand or use FSE. None of them want to! Both client types want a site they can put content into and it conforms to the design constraints I’ve provided.

          And for my part? I’ve tried making the sort of flexible dynamic solutions I used to be able to make with PHP and wordpress, and the static templates and theme.json nested hell just makes it fifteen times more complicated for half the impact.

          Every 6 months or so I have another try with FSE. I do the whole “build my custom blocks” build steps. I try to wrangle theme.json to present the correct options. I run into roadblocks and roadblocks. Issues which have sat unfixed for 3 years. And I find that I’ve spent 5 days getting a half working shell together.

          It’s just not been a good 5 years for WordPress. I no longer recommend it to clients. It’s too complex to support.

          Create forum topic from comment
          Reply

      • Completely agree.

        Gutenberg is not bad per se and in many ways is big improvement. But as you say it’s hard to develop for. I’d also add it incorporates features which are not just unneccessary but also harmful to running a cms.

        The biggest problem is, however, is that it’s the main priority atm which means more important things are shelved

        Create forum topic from comment
        Reply

  2. Why doesn’t anyone seem to care that WordPress media handling is absolutely terrible? There is no clean way to tell if media is being used and where, or a simple way to substitute media, or reassign content from duplicate media. I have sites with multiple editors that will just reload media every post rather than look to see it is existing, ballooning their sites with junk. I have discussed this with a handful of colleagues with the same frustration.

    Create forum topic from comment
    Reply

  3. I wish this survey had delved into the question of how many people use Classic Editor vs Gutenberg and why they don’t use Gutenberg. I feel like there’s a lot at stake by pushing forward with a sunsetting of Classic Editor (and Classic Widgets) without getting robust feedback about who uses it and why.
    What were the questions that were supposed to be answered by this survey? Because I definitely did not feel I was fully able to express myself and my needs in it.

    Create forum topic from comment
    Reply

  4. The survey highlighted issues with WordPress.

    Scale-based questions in market research often fail due to question framing, previous questions, or interviewer influence, missing the real problems.

    I wanted to voice dissatisfaction with core development priorities, such as unwanted Gutenberg features and neglected APIs and bugs.

    Unfortunately, the survey didn’t provide a platform for this, and I believe others share this sentiment.

    Create forum topic from comment
    Reply

  5. Hm, I can’t recommend WordPress to my customers in good faith anymore. I wrote comment under one post of the WP Facebook page and got banned, just because it was critical of Gutenberg’s developement. Sorry, that is not the way to handle critic by a long term WordPress user. My personal account is blocked to the day, since nearly two months now.

    Create forum topic from comment
    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

You may also like

Newsletter

Subscribe Via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Discover more from WP Tavern

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading