I came across a post called Blogging for traffic not design, wherein the author regales us with an anecdote about an unnamed web developer and blogger who put hours of effort into designing their own website because they didn’t want to use a prebuilt solution like Wordpress or Bear Blog.
As a result — at least according to Andy Hawthorne — they aren’t getting any traffic. There are a few reasons why this could be the case, of course.
- The blogger might not have been blogging often enough or long enough to build an audience yet.
- The blogger might have been so focused on building their site that there’s nothing for people to read yet.
- The blogger might not be providing metadata in their pages and blog posts so that search engines can properly index their blog.
- The blogger might have neglected to generate a web feed and make it discoverable.
What does Andy seize upon? None of these. Instead, Andy seems to think that the problem is that this unnamed blogger took a DIY approach instead of using Wordpress
Why Wordpress? According to Andy:
- It powers 43% of the web.
- Big commercial publishers like The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Reuters use it.
- They have allegedly spent millions of dollars making sure pages load fast.
- And because it’s so prevalent, search engines already know how to read websites built with Wordpress.
I don’t buy Andy’s reasoning. For starters, is Andy talking about Wordpress.com or Wordpress.org? The former is software-as-a-service run by Automattic, and the latter is “self-hosted” on your choice of providers like Dreamhost, WPengine, etc. The two have a rather different user experience, though one can get a lot of Wordpress.com functionality on your Wordpress.org installation using Automattic’s Jetpack.
Next, if Wordpress’ default SEO is as good as Andy thinks it is, why do SEO plugins like Yoast exist? My understanding, as somebody who used to run a Wordpress.org installation, is that Wordpress’ default SEO config is fucking abysmal. Even adding stuff like post descriptions is a pain. And if you care about people sharing links to your site on socials, Wordpress won’t set up the appropriate metadata on its own, let alone anything esoteric like schema.org microdata.
I certainly don’t think it’s wise to encourage further use of Wordpress when its co-founder, Matt Mullenweg, is merrily starting public beefs with major Wordpress hosting providers like WPEngine. I also think that, since their adoption of block editing with Gutenberg, that blogging on Wordpress has become a miserable fucking experience.
That’s one reason why I went for a DIY approach here on starbreaker.org. Admittedly, I could sidestep all of Wordpress’ problems by using Bear Blog, or Mataroa, or Pika, or some other platform or CMS. I just don’t want to, dammit.
Do I get traffic on my custom-built DIY website that I can build on any computer that can run GNU/Linux or some kind of BSD? As a matter of fact, I do. I don’t know how much because I don’t use analytics — nor do I particularly care because this still isn’t a side hustle — but the fact that I get at least one email a week from people who read my stuff suggests that my visitor count is a non-zero number.
Perhaps I could have more readers if I didn’t build my website with shell scripts and a makefile, but I like building my website my way, with tools I chose or built myself. I wouldn’t get that sort of satisfaction if I used Wordpress, or even ClassicPress. I mean, I could use Kirby, but I would rather improve upon what I’ve built for myself.
Besides, if Andy Hawthorne really wanted to help this blogger, he’d have linked to their website. You cannot, and should not depend on commercial search engines to bring people your way. They don’t give a fuck about you or your website. They just want to show people ads, and it’s easier for them to do that if people aren’t leaving their sites to visit yours. You need to link to other people’s websites, and be interesting enough and kind enough that other people link to you.
update for 19 February 2025
It looks like I wasn’t the only one who disagreed with Andy’s opinion. Here are replies by DanQ, moddedbear, Manuel Moreale, and Kev Quirk. But since Andy Hawthorne seems to have taken down his Bear blog, I’m linking to the Wayback Machine’s copy of his post.