Why I don’t use Squarespace or WordPress

38 thoughts on “Why I don’t use Squarespace or WordPress”

1. Word press sucks. I hear

2. All i want is a website that will get ke clients ….bottom line does it do this or not?

3. Great video, thanks Chris!

4. Do you know anything about WordPress?

5. Hey Chris, it's clear that you don't have a deep understanding of website performance and the factors that can impact it. While it is true that WordPress has the potential to offer great performance, this can only be achieved if you use the right theme or page builder. In your case, it seems that your site has decent performance on desktop, but your mobile pagespeed scores are very poor. Mobile pagespeed is becoming increasingly important, as more and more users access the internet from their smartphones. Achieving good performance on mobile can be more challenging than on desktop, so it's important to prioritize it.

   It's funny that you would make fun of WordPress without understanding the full picture. A simple website like yours should be able to achieve good performance with the right setup and optimization. I would recommend doing more research and gaining more experience before making assumptions about WordPress or website performance in general.

6. My biggest problem with WordPress is that every plugin requires a subscription now.

7. What are those graphics card boxes in the background?

8. People talking about slow websites with WordPress probably has never built a website with Gutenberg with a theme like Astra, for example. The page speed test results are similar to that of a static website. As for WordPress security, yeah it's weak., not because it's the fault of WordPress, rather the plug-ins that rely on WordPress sucks. The plugin publishers don't patch up their bugs often enough.

   Those who complain about WordPress being slow need to build their website out with Gutenberg. Stay away from page builders like Elementor where their place in WordPress is fading away.

   Where WordPress truly shines is the plethora of plugins that is unmatched compared to a static website.

9. WordPress definitely needs some skill to configure properly but it can be done
   my wordpress site loads in about 1-2 seconds and when cloudflare caches it that can go as low as 200ms

10. I am using a Thrive Themes for every WP needs. Basically lets you get rid of nearly all the other plugins. They focus on speed whether we talk website speed or speed of your work. My sites are all very fast on gtmetrix too but that also thanks to a cloudflare and image cdn. I understand what are you suggesting with this video and must agree. However I found my way around it and now I just make sites fast and they are static, too. I think its really about finding the style and the way. Once you understand what is actually WP downside and you eliminate it, the path is clearer. Then you find yourself rather making your own themes then buying them and you avoid those crappy frameworks, theme options, different scripts and junk. I believe once you find out how you gonna make it, you will stop messing around with tutorials, plugins, themes off the internet and learning all the frameworks. You just build it with the ones you know well – this is where I recommend Thrive Themes or similar. Something you can rely on and use for all purposes, without jumping around from theme to theme, plugin to plugin.

11. I went with one of the third options, NameCheap recently, but I’ve heard good things about WebFlow, which is less expensive than SquareSpace but more than NameCheap per month or year.

12. Best of both worlds: i love the wordpress templates. But i generate static html out of it. Did that 10 years ago using a “spider” plugin in firefox or chrome.
    When you how to optimize pictures or use jpegmini or similar you reduce load times. Cheapo and easy and ultra fast and mega secure.

13. Hey, which distro is this?? Thanks!

14. Your Website got 50 Points on PageSpeed Insights and you're talking about performance LMAO

15. "WordPress is slow" Bruh it depends on how you work with WordPress 😂.

16. For me WordPress is ok, BUT third party themes could be a nightmare because of a different PHP version compared with yours, the docs can be confusing, they depend on many plugins to function, etc… Personally I prefer to develop sites on Rails or Sinatra.

17. Our website is static generated using github and netlfiy. We also push media from AWS cloudfront CDN. Our cloudmetrix score is A: Performance
    100%: Structure 97%: Largest Contentful Paint 311ms: Total Blocking Time 0ms: Cumulative Layout Shift 0.01 =) I had no idea before this video, but was pleasantly surprised. We offer the same deal for our customers who want simple brochure style websites…super cheap to host, super quick to deploy and secure. But yes the downside is they can't make their own changes – but we are upfront with them about that, and our hosting fee includes basic changes.

18. Image Peter McKinnon sit down and code his website…yeah, not gonna happen

19. You can't build complicated websites by yourself at almost no cost without using software like wordpress.

20. Aka. The anti-sponsor video.

    I loaded your website and its load time is glorious. Sincerely an appreciative web dev.

21. WordPress is so popular because it's fundamentally free and anyone (with word processor level skills) can use the admin backend to create content. For some simple brochure sites, I use a wget bash script to mirror static pages and use them as the main site and keep the real WP on my LAN. WP has its place. Try to add a simple contact mail form to a static site without involving 3rd party sites, let alone comments and ecommerce!

22. Another huge problem with wordpress is it makes it very difficult to mirror a website because of the PHP bullshit. A few of the "all rights reserved" crowd may think it's a feature, but this means the website and the potentially useful information it carries will be a mess to archive with missing assets. It really should be as easy as 'wget -m' to download a website. If you run a website to spread useful technical or other information, please don't use WordPress, Blogspot and all that crap.

23. One of the principle reasons to use WordPress are its plugins. It offers features and logic, i.e. extensibility. That's very compelling. If your content is static, a static page regenerator makes a lot of sense. Otherwise, the slower page load speed in WordPress is a reasonable compromise to gain the ability to have it do so much other stuff.

24. All right for static sites.
    But even brochure sites today need enough back end for customer reviews/testimonials.
    WordPress is plain stupidly slow. And so many faulty functionalities, never mind the security holes.
    All fixed framework back ends and CMSs have performance drawbacks.
    Need an adjustable and headless CMS and a tunable modular back end. Nice if Netlify went free on small business sites too – but they won't 😁

25. Good video, although I don’t agree with all your opinions in it. That said if your site is so great open source it. Show me the code. That said you’ll probably never see this and probably won’t respond.

26. Not completely True tho I see a lot of WordPress sites dominating niches and on top when it comes to SEO so I would have to disagree with you there . I do agree that they are slow and have a lot of problems if you don't know how to build them correctly. The static sites is great for speed and quick changes. But most clients these days want to be able to log into there website to do there thing .So for this reason I can't hate these management systems. They help us . And help people who don't know how to code websites build websites . Also it's cost effective.

27. Pictureofhotdog is actually comparable to the size of your site, actually slightly larger and unpacks more. The second one is definitely slow just because of high hi-res images, which is expected with any service dynamic or not. Honestly i don't think dynamic really slows you down that much, and if it does you can always use some sort of caching. I think you're not that far off from just hosting your own python or go server which is gonna give you much more flexibility

28. Worked in the internet hosting slash web design world for 15 years. WordPress and the template-type platforms have ruined Web Design and especially webhosting, IMHO. I get it why its used… I do. It makes dollars-sense. But it's terrible, and "devs" and "admins" who support it, should feel bad.

29. Good video.

30. 4:20 Thanks Obama

31. BASED!

32. This video was sponsored by SquareSpace. If you need squares, we've got squares. Come and get your freaking squares. Your freaking squares are all your square needs all the freaking time. We've got little squares and big squares and even cubes. Have you ever seen a freaking cube? Ever seen Cube 2 supercube? Pretty good. Not as good as superman, but for what a movie is. SquareSpace. If you've got a space, we've got a square for you.

33. Cache: let me introduce myself lol

34. if you have many static pages, and want to change site-wide text like title or categories, you have to regenerate all pages. with static site you do not have own comments.

35. Awesome video Chris!

    Thank you for this amazing concept of static sites. Personally, i started to test Simply Static Plugin for WordPress yesterday. This allows to convert my wordpress website to a static one with a click of a button.

    I still have the familiarity of wordpress but now I have also the speed of static sites. I can install WordPress in a completely contained environment (on a local host or even vm) and then push the outcome alone to the public. I don't even have to use heavy and slow security plugins because there is really NOTHING TO HACK ANYMORE!!

    At the same time my site decreased from over 400 mb all the way down to 1,5 mb which is just completely insane.

    If you want to or just have to keep WordPress and it's familiar environment but at the same time you would like to remove most of its vulnerabilities, Simply Static is definitely a way to go!

    The only issue I have now is how to generate my xml sitemap for sites kept on the local host but with my main domain inside the file. I'm still trying to figure that out.

36. What if you need some interaction with user and add some server side php logic or somerhing else?

37. Typically love your videos, but this extremely one-sided. Professionally, WP is the right play 99% of the time. When it comes to actual marketing, gimmicks like Wix and Squarespace are garbage. If the dev knows what he’s doing, optimizing for site speed and security is a cake walk. And good luck even attempting to do SEO and schema on Wix/SS. All of our clients get WP, period. No negotiation.

38. i have extensive experience with WordPress/squarespace/ wix since in my previous job that was all i did for client's and i hated it so much. not only was the drag and drop experience frustrating to work with, but basic features would force uou to buy a higher tier membership. WordPress was my favorite but the constant need for updates and security concerns not only with WordPress core but the actual hosting provider was a pain point. sometimes the basics its the best solution. my recomendation to you is to use yaml files, or json data to populate your content it will make it easier to edit instead of doing inline markup. just my thoughts

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