Yoast SEO Founder: WordPress Admin Interface Is “Simply Bad” – Search Engine Journal
Yoast SEO plugin founder, Joost de Valk, published a critical appraisal of the WordPress user interface (UI), saying that it makes it “harder to use” and may be a reason that contributes to WordPress losing market share to companies like Wix and Shopify.
The official WordPress design philosophy states that they want to make WordPress easier to use with every new version published.
They write that it’s their goal that the “non-technically minded” user is the one they design for so that they can be set up within five minutes with a fully functional website.
However the reality of how easy WordPress is to use falls far short of their philosophy statement.
Even the developer of WordPress itself, Matt Mullenweg, said that designing in Wix is faster than doing the same thing in WordPress.
WordPress User Interface Design
Joost points the finger at the current WordPress admin user interface as a contributing factor to why WordPress is confusing to use.
He called attention to the fact that WordPress has three different user interfaces, forcing users to learn how to use each interface and complicating the experience of using WordPress.
To make things worse, themes and plugins introduce their own user interface elements, which again forces users to learn an entirely different way to navigate and user the software.
An ideal user interface (UI) offers a consistent workspace so that a user doesn’t have to stop and rethink where all the buttons and links are.
Interacting with the interface should be similar across every screen, regardless of what they are trying to accomplish.
Joost wrote:
“The current state is simply bad: WordPress core basically has 3 designs now.
The edit post page I’m typing this in looks nothing like the Posts overview page, which looks nothing like the Site Health page.
And then you go into plugins and each has their own UI there too. This makes WordPress as a whole harder to use.”
WordPress is Old Fashioned and Losing Market Share
Aside from the UI being inconsistent, Joost also pointed out that competitors like Wix have a consistent UI throughout their content management systems.
So while the rest of the world is moving on with best practices WordPress is stuck with the same inconsistent interface it’s had for years.
Yoast insisted that the poor user interface is contributing to the exodus of users from WordPress to competitors.
“This is how we lose CMS market share to companies like Wix and Shopify (who each do have their own design system).”
Is WordPress Hard to Use?
A major feature that makes a closed source CMS like Wix attractive is that it’s easy to use. One of the …….
