The WordPress drama shows why WordPress remains the best choice

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Over the last few months, the WordPress community has been a bit of a mess. The short version of the “mess” is that Matt Mullenweg (the man behind WordPress) is not happy with WP Engine (a major host of WordPress sites) and it’s causing a lot of fallout. My friend Aaron has a great timeline of events if you want to dig in a bit deeper.

While it’s all very unfortunate and it’s hurting the WordPress ecosystem quite a lot, it also shows why WordPress remains the best platform for most websites.

Because WordPress is self-hosted (you can download it and run it wherever you want), there is only so much that Matt (or anyone else) can do to break things. He’s causing a mess, and many of our clients are hosted on WP Engine, but the direct impacts have been minimal because with WordPress you fully own your site.

Matt isn’t happy with WP Engine, but he can’t do much about it. We have a lot of clients hosted on WP Engine, and their sites are fine.

Why not Squarespace?

This is the main difference between WordPress and other platforms like Squarespace or Shopify. If Anthony Casalena (CEO of Squarespace) or Tobias Lütke (CEO of Shopify) had a similar beef, they could literally just shut websites down if they wanted to. They both seem like solid leaders, but many thought the same of Matt Mullenweg until recent months. Things can change.

We’ve actually seen this happen in small doses, like when Squarespace shut down the website for America’s Frontline Doctors. The question of “should they have shut them down?” aside, the fact is that companies like Squarespace have the power to do that with the push of a button. With WordPress, they don’t.

With WordPress, the worst case would be for your specific hosting company to decide to shut down your site, at which point you move to another host and keep going because you fully own your site.

This WordPress mess is frustrating, but it’s exactly the reason that we’ve been such a proponent of WordPress over the years. This may have long-term implications for the platform, but for now your WordPress sites will remain fully in your control and no one can take that away from you.

97% of web pages get zero traffic from Google

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Things are changing quickly when it comes to getting your site to rank well on Google. A big one, as I shared a few months ago, is that 64% of visitors that use Google never end up visiting a traditional website, instead getting the answer from Google itself or from a related Google product (Maps, YouTube, etc). It’s a huge number.

In a recent video, Rand Fishkin shared another staggering statistic (via Tim Soulo from Ahrefs) — nearly 97% of web pages on the internet get literally zero traffic from Google. Here is the chart from Tim:

I’m not suggesting that you give up trying to rank on Google, as there is still huge value there, but we need to recognize the increasing inability to do so. The key to remember is that while things are shifting with Google, people are still spending more and more time online. The users are there, and the tactics through which to reach them are simply changing.

This is kind of the idea behind Gary Vaynerchuk’s “Day Trading Attention” — just go where the users are. Have a solid website as a home base, and then spend time wherever people are spending time. In Rand’s video he says:

“The big platforms, you’re gonna take all of our traffic and that is okay because I can still have influence by being present in the places where people pay attention.”

Don’t give up on Google and SEO, but if that’s your primary source of traffic it’s time to start diversifying immediately. If you need help doing that, let’s chat.

The evolution of websites

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The internet is changing rapidly, thanks to big shifts in social media and the ongoing wave of AI. Websites have largely remained the same in recent years, staying strong as the home for every business on the internet. I don’t think that will be changing anytime soon, but the nature of the sites themselves may begin to shift.

In a recent blog post, Jeremiah Owyang had some interesting predictions for where AI could be leading, I found two to be quite interesting. The first:

As AI Agents become the dominant entities on the internet, website owners will cater to them by offering Agent APIs that instantly provide information to our AI agents, rather than simulating a human click path as AI agents do today.

In short, if we’re using AI to accomplish tasks (“ChatGPT, how do I solve this problem?”), websites will need to be able provide information to other AI bots and not just humans.

However, I think this will largely be a separate layer. Many websites use APIs today (interfaces to help tools connect together), and those will simply become more robust. The main front-end of a website can remain human-focused, and the APIs can work hard to serve AI bots.

Owyang also said:

Websites won’t go away, but they will need to evolve. When humans visit websites, the content could be AI-generated and personalized to the individual user. The era of thousands of web pages is no longer needed.

This is where the front-end of websites may shift in the coming years. The challenge will be knowing enough about each user to be able to properly customize the page to their needs. This is easy for sites where you log in (the content that you see on Facebook is clearly customized to your needs), but it’s more difficult for open sites.

While it feels like websites have tons of data on us, and some do, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get all of that info summarized. For a website to be able to really customize the content via AI, it’d need to know a lot about you instantly, which is an idea that’s actually fading further away. This is a great thing for privacy, but could lead to some tricky developments in the coming years.

Owyang’s article is quite short, and I encourage you to give it a read. How do you see websites changing in the coming years?

Creating “zero click” content

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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, a growing problem with Google is the number of “zero click” searches on there — searches that don’t lead to another click, because Google answered the question for you. It’s generally a good thing for users, but it’s a bad thing for companies wanting to get more website traffic.

In the case of Google, there’s not much you can do. In other cases, though, it might be best to just lean into this trend. Most social media sites quietly penalize posts that have links in them (hence the silly and annoying “link in comments” that you see so often), so it might be best to simply forego the link and just let people see your content.

This video from the Content Marketing Institute (which I briefly shared last week) talks about this very subject about halfway through:
https://www.linkedin.com/events/7204588791657869312/comments/

No links?

For what I’m trying to accomplish with this blog, a lack of links is fine. I don’t care if you read this on LinkedIn or Medium or Substack or whatever, because I’m not trying to sell anything.

For many companies, it’s the same. If their content simply gets shared and viewed more often, it’s a win.

However, what about posts like this one? If you’re reading this on LinkedIn, I didn’t ever link back to my original blog post (trying to go “zero click”), but I still had to include some links to make the content more valuable. Telling you about that video and then making you go find it yourself would be frustrating, so I included a link to it. However, LinkedIn and other social platforms literally encourage content creators to make their content less valuable (with zero links) in order to get more exposure for it.

I get it, because their goal is to keep you on their site so they can make more ad revenue, but it’s frustrating nonetheless.

At the end of the day, the “zero click” content approach might be a solid idea. In the video above, Rand Fishkin tells a story of an agency owner that changed up their marketing, watching their digital metrics (website visits, etc) plummet, but saw their sales rise. While it feels kind of broken to do it that way, all of us would be happy to have a similar outcome.

Moving our clients to “zero click” will take some time and some testing, but it’s something worth trying out.

The majority of Google searches don’t lead to websites

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It’s a trend that has been growing for years, but the number of “zero-click” searches on Google continues to grow (where a zero-click search is one where the user doesn’t ever click through to a website).

In a recent post on the SparkToro blog, Rand Fishkin points out that in 2024 only 360 of every 1,000 searches lead to a result on the open web. That means that 64% of visitors to Google never end up visiting a traditional website, which is a huge number.

The problem is two-fold:

First, many search questions are answered right on the page, either with a simple answer from Google or with an AI-powered result.

Second, Google does as much as it can to send users to other Google properties. Rand explains:

Equally concerning, especially for those worried about Google’s monopoly power to self-preference their own properties in the results, is that almost 30% of all clicks go to platforms Google owns. YouTube, Google Images, Google Maps, Google Flights, Google Hotels, the Google App Store, and dozens more means that Google gets even more monetization and sector-dominating power from their search engine.

This trend is unlikely to slow down, much less reverse, so we need to start coming up with other ideas to continue to be found online. SEO is going to become a much more challenging game if Google is literally sending fewer visitors to websites.

At the same time, Google search continues to be the dominant player in the search market and that doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Even with Google taking more of the pie for themselves, there are still many billions of visitors that Google sends out to the web every month, and ignoring that completely would be foolish.

If and when Google takes their next big step into AI-powered results remains to be seen, and likely will have a big impact on things, so I’m sure I’ll have more to say as things continue to develop. For now, I encourage you to check out Rand’s full post to dig into the details.

All of your old Google Analytics data will vanish on July 1

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In the last move of Google’s weird switch from “Universal Analytics” (“UA”, the Google Analytics that everyone has used for years) to “Google Analytics 4” will happen in just a few weeks. For those not familiar with this, Google Analytics is software used to track information about your website visitors, and Google made a massive change to this software a few years ago.

While the old Analytics stopped tracking traffic a year ago, you’ve still been able to access that old data for historical purposes. Starting the week of July 1, all of that data will be deleted.

On one hand, this isn’t a huge deal. The data is all at least a year old, and most of it is much older. On the other hand, keeping historical data can be very important for long-term trends, so losing access to that is troublesome.

Sometime between now and July 1, you’d be wise to export that old data to have on hand just in case. For GreenMellen clients, we’ve already backed up all of that old data so we’re able to use it as needed going forward. If you’re a client of ours, this is part of our normal maintenance plan and nothing special needs to happen on your end — it’s already done.

If you need help getting it backed up, feel free to reach out and we can chat. Either way, be sure you have it saved before July or it’ll be gone with no way to get it back!

There’s still a world outside these walls

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For those of you over 40, you can likely still remember the “good old days” on the internet, back when people set up their own places to visit, rather than relying on a handful of huge companies trying to lock your attention inside of their walls (which is very likely how you found this post).

Molly White recently wrote an amazing piece about the history of the web, but she’s not giving up hope that we can return there. Here is some of what she said:

Social networks have become “the web” for many people who rarely venture outside of their tall and increasingly reinforced walls. As Tom Eastman once put it, the web has rotted into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”.

She goes on to explain how things have changed, but then offered some encouragement:

The thing is: none of this is gone. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it’s become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses.

The challenge is that the more time people spend inside of the “tall and increasingly reinforced walls” (social media networks), the harder is it to be willing to venture outside of them. For businesses, working inside of these walls makes life easier, but also can choke you out. You’re limited in what you’re able to do and you can’t take that stuff with you if you decide to leave:

If a tenant decided they were sick of their spot within a walled garden, well, they could leave — but it meant they abandoned what they had built, and the path for friends or admirers of their work to come visit them became a lot more arduous to traverse.

The great thing is that while it feels arduous to venture outside of the walls and set up your own space on the internet, it’s literally never been easier to do.

And if anything, it is easier now to do all of this than it ever was. In the early days, people had to fight to enter the expanse at all, and those who did were starting with little. Now, the expanse feels ubiquitous in some countries, and is becoming ever more accessible in the others. Sophisticated tools and techniques are available even to novices. Where once the walled gardens were the only viable option for novice gardeners or those without many resources, that is no longer so much the case — and the skills and resources required to establish one’s own sovereign plot become more accessible by the day.

While it’s easier than ever to set up your own space on the internet, many people simply feel less inclined to do so. This is in part due to how easy it is to set up an Instagram account versus building your own site, and the other challenge is that the majority of people spend their time inside of those big walls.

The web doesn’t have to exist entirely within those walls, and it’s completely up to us to make the web the way we want it.

Do you have any kind of website or presence outside of social media? If so, drop a link here so we can check it out and then take a few minutes to read Molly’s full, amazing post.

Blogs are still among the highest-ranking pages

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While it’s been well-established that users don’t click on the “blog” page for most sites, having those posts can still be incredibly valuable. The purpose of most blogs (not this one) are to drive people to the website via Google search, and then lead them to the pages that matter (registration, purchase, etc).

For those kinds of goals, blogs are still fantastic.

In a study from Brightedge Research, where they looked at 10,000 keywords across 10 industries, they found that the most common type of page found in the top 10 results on Google were blog posts. Here’s the breakdown:

Helpful content is always going to perform well on Google, and blogging is one of the best ways to generate content that your audience will find to be helpful.

I have my concerns about the future of blogging for SEO, largely depending on where AI takes us, but for now it’s still a great thing to do if you want your business to show up well on Google. Business blogs give you a great place to showcase your expertise and drive more users to your site. It’s a win-win.

Check out the full study from Brightedge here, and this post from Search Engine Land digs into it quite a bit more.

Artwork is signed because it matters who created it

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I’ve mentioned a few times on here that I’m not a fan of companies that put a “designed by” link in the footer of websites that they create. Google clearly says not to do it, and putting a link there is entirely for the (misguided) advantage of the designer, to the detriment of the site they stick their link on.

One reaction that I sometimes hear about this is that it’s “like an artist signing their painting”, and that the customer should be proud to have worked with that agency. It’s an interesting concept, but I disagree on a few counts:

  • It’s not helping the client site to sell more of their product. No one is going to visit the site, consider making a purchase, see “designed by Acme” in the footer, and then decide that they’re reputable enough to trust.
  • A signature on a painting increases the value of it, while a link in the footer doesn’t.
  • Not only does a footer link fail to increase the value of the site, it actually decreases the value.

I’m noticing that this happens less and less frequently, which is fantastic, but it’s still not acceptable when it does. If you have a “designed by” link at the bottom of your site, you should try to determine if the company that did it is either ignorant of how search engines work, or if they’re shady enough to be ripping you off.

Why should your website rank higher than theirs?

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A few weeks ago I was chatting with a friend and he was upset that his site wasn’t ranking first on Google for a particular keyword. We ran the search, and sure enough he was in fifth. I proposed a very simple challenge: click the top ranking, and then tell me if his site really deserves to rank higher.

In this case it was incredibly clear. His page for this keyword consisted of one sentence of text and a small photo gallery, while the top ranked site had a more text, photos, testimonials, and other great information. I told him that if I were Google, I’d absolutely leave that other site ranked at the top. He reluctantly agreed.

You can do the same.

If you’re being outranked for a particular search term, look at the pages that rank ahead of you and then make your page better than the ones at the top. Most of the time it’ll take some effort to simply match the top page, but go further. Give your page more info, better photos, clear calls to action, incredible resources, fast loading times, etc. Make it so it’s not even close.

There are certainly times when the top ranked page really isn’t very good, and figuring out why can be frustrating. In most cases, though, the work you need to do in order to take the top spot is pretty clear and you simply need to put in the effort to get there.