October 15, 2024

Matt does not like static websites

Last June, before the whole WordPress drama with WPEngine, Matt Mullenweg held a speech at WordCamp Europe in Turin. He said WordPress scales well, its code is poetry and ‘dynamic sites are better’.

First of all, saying that WordPress scales well is weird. He literally said ‘it is incredible how much this can scale’, referring to hosting a WordPress website, as he talks about page views. It does not make sense because WordPress uses up to 100 times more resources than a static website and Matt knows that. Even the smallest WordPress website will make your server go down as soon as it becomes popular. However, it is a common tactic to advertise the exact opposite of what is true. Shell spents millions of dollars on greenwashing their oil business. They want you to believe they care about this planet. Matt wants you to believe WordPress scales well.

Secondly, if you follow this blog you know I do not think of WordPress code as poetry, on the contrary. The code of Wordpress is a big bowl of spaghetti. It comes from multiple vendors, who even fight with each other and Matt might have something to do with that ;-).

Finally, he says ‘dynamic sites are better’, followed by an attack on static sites for small businesses. This sheds some light on his previous remarks. Static sites scale better and have cleaner code, so this is clearly what is treathening him. He supports his ‘dynamic sites are better claim’ by saying that static sites are not exciting, followed by the suggestive question: Who wants a static site? He clearly struggles to make a real point. He continues to argue that restaurant owners should not just put their menu and hours on their website, but they should make communities out of them by adding a blog and asking users to subscribe, thus making their site dynamic. However, any static site can have a blog and a subscribe button. This is where he advances to the next slide…

Matt, relax!

Matt, if you read this, some words of advice: You seem to think that static sites are a threat to your eco-system and you have to attack them. I can assure you they are not. Your crusade is useless and honestly, quite painful to watch. Static sites are developed for and by programmers at Google and other tech companies: professionals who want clean and simple code that scales well. They are not interested in your DIY platform. Your competitors are Wix, Webflow and Squarespace. Go attack them… or just relax.

Happy coding!

()  Joost van der Schee