362 – Inside WordPress with Raitis Sevelis: UI/UX, IndyStack, and community

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast, you have reached episode number 362 entitled inside WordPress with Raitis Sevelis, UI UX, IndyStack and community. It was published on Thursday, the 22nd of February 2024.

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Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, it's an interview episode with the Raitis Sevelis. Raitis has been on the podcast before. He is a great source of knowledge for all things WordPress. He's been in the space for absolutely ages. As you'll hear, he's worked with products like WP Bakery, Visual Composer, IndyStack, WP Raccoon. You'll find out more about those, but we have a really wide ranging chat all about, well, the community, UI UX, accessibility. The need for plugins to focus less on commercialization and perhaps more on community.

There's absolutely loads in here. It's a really broad discussion, as I say. And I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast today by Raitis Sevelis. How are you doing, Raitis?

[00:03:34] Raitis Sevelis: Hey, Nathan, I'm good. How are you?

[00:03:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Did I get your surname right?

[00:03:39] Raitis Sevelis: Yes, it's actually a rare case and yeah I am pleased with that.

[00:03:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I give myself a sticker for that. If you've been listening to this podcast for a long, time, then you'll have heard Raitus's voice because he's been on in a number of different formats and a absolute pleasure having him back today.

However, there's going to be a proportion of you who don't know who Raitus is. So let's do the introduction piece, give you a minute or two to just say who you are, where you come from, what companies you have worked for and are working for. All the background of WordPress, basically. So over to you, just give us a, give us your biography, really.

[00:04:18] Raitis Sevelis: Hey, try to be sure and Yeah, I'm in WordPress for 10 years Almost, we'll celebrate that on December 1st, and, I've been working as a product manager but also involved in user interface, user experience of, WPBakery page builder, Visual Composer website builder, and also recently in IndyStack, which is managed WordPress hosting.

my background comes from agency. before WordPress, I worked as a UI UX designer at the local agency and also for international companies. And, the cool thing about WordPress and WPBakery is that, basically I discovered, both, things at the same date. it was, I was asked, hey, do you want to get involved in WPBakery and what would you improve?

I started to look more into WordPress and WPBakery from that perspective. Okay, what's missing in, the ecosystem? yeah, last 10 years, things changed a lot. So a lot of things happened basically in our community, but here I am. Still excited at, about the, about WordPress, about community, about what I am doing.

[00:05:47] Nathan Wrigley: It's an amazing ecosystem to be in really, isn't it? And I've been, here for not quite as long as you probably more like eight, maybe, pushing nine years, something like that. And there's never been a period of time where it got stale. There's never a period of time where it was like, Oh, it's the same this year as it was last year.

It really is a constant state of flux, which I suppose keeps us on our toes, but also Means that you've got to try and keep up. C can we just totally segue, 'cause we're gonna talk about plugins during this podcast episode primarily and your endeavors over at WP Racoon. But before that you mentioned Indie Stack and you mentioned that's a, managed WordPress hosting, endeavor.

But could you just tell us a little bit more about that? what makes it manage WordPress hosting? What's the U V P, the unique value proposition that they've got over there? 'cause I'm, curious, I haven't really touched on Indie Stack on this podcast, so can we just go there for a few minutes?

[00:06:40] Raitis Sevelis: yes, sure. as we all know, there are plenty of different hosting companies, for WordPress specifically. But, what, what we discovered is that for an WordPress community, maybe not that technical, hosting can be... A bit of a nightmare and of course not everyone can afford developer or sometimes developer just passes things over to the client and what we wanted basically to do is to make a hosting platform that is Super cool for developers, have all the developer grade features, but at the same time offers user interface and simplicity that, these days is appreciated by VIX users, by Squarespace users, because, when we look on WordPress in general, It is a bit of technical, still, for an average user, it is not that easy to get into WordPress because of different user interfaces and basically, as Forbes said, you need to know how to code or be a bit advanced to handle WordPress.

So we want to fill that gap, we want to make sure that at least when it comes to hosting. Any person is able to configure their WordPress website without, reading books about it?

[00:08:11] Nathan Wrigley: I've got to say the, the, if you go to, as you might imagine, the URL is indystack. com. So that's I N D Y stack, all as one word, indystack. com. There's a, there's some illustrations there. not illustrations. There's some, photographs I guess of the, dashboard and it just looks really nice.

It just looks really professional and up to the minute. Which, which is, it can't be said for certain other implementations. every time I see cPanel these days, I scratch my head and think, how does anybody navigate that these days? But, there you go. I'm sure if you've got muscle memory there, it's, it's very easy to do.

But IndyStacks Endeavor then is. That you basically, it looks like on your pricing, at least you have an option to, set up one site. And so presumably your, pitch is towards people, as you said, who are fairly inexperienced with WordPress at the minute, that's priced at 1499 per month or 165, give or take a few cents per annum, and that allows you to have one site, 10 gigabytes of storage, which in all honesty, if you step over that with one site, you.

You're probably doing, you're probably doing something wrong. 10 gigabytes is an awful lot of data. and you offer support and malware scanning and backups and all of those kinds of things. And then there's options for other agency things. So is the endeavor then really that if I was an inexperienced WordPress user, I come along, click a few buttons, pay my money, and I'm good to go.

I've got a website. So in a way, it's like a SaaS experience, like a Wix or a Squarespace type experience, but WordPress is installed along, the way.

[00:09:46] Raitis Sevelis: to some extent, yes, actually. we, of course, yeah, you mentioned that, the pricing represents, more of an average business person who just wants to launch their website. But, yeah, we also work with agencies that, that great. Multiple sites. So for them, we have different packages available for their growth and so on.

what is interesting about IndyStack? The two things. First, you can easily transfer website to your client. So client will own, will have the ownership while agency or developer will still have access. And for developers who are just starting to work with, For clients, with, WordPress maybe, we offer build for free option, which means you can create a site for free and even showcase that to your client, collaborate, there.

And then once the site is ready, you basically transfer it to the client and the client starts to pay for that. So for many developers, maybe for, from developing countries, that's a great money saver. So you don't have to pay anything while you are developing.

[00:10:58] Nathan Wrigley: Wait, that's, that is interesting. I don't think I've heard that before. That's fascinating. Okay. So if I'm a developer, okay, so let's say I've got an agency and I'm building WordPress websites for people. What you're saying is that with IndyStack, I could, spend a year, let's just pick an extraordinarily large amount of time out of thin air.

I could spend a year developing that site. on, on my side of IndyStack, I don't know if there's cost involved with that or whether that's a free service at that point. And then I transfer it to the client who then takes control, but I could still in theory have access to developing that. So yeah, that's really interesting.

[00:11:36] Raitis Sevelis: Yeah, exactly. Of course, we are now playing around with, with the period, talking to developers to understand what's the average period for development that is required because of course, we have costs on our side to, to support that. so we want to find the best, the best period for, that development environment, but currently, yes, there are no limits.

So. everyone is welcome.

[00:12:08] Nathan Wrigley: That's really interesting. And how do you differentiate between a live site and a development site? Is it that the URL is some, pseudorandom string, so rather than it being example. com, it's xyz321? indystack. com or something like that. And obviously it's unusable to the client in that way.

[00:12:30] Raitis Sevelis: We, yeah, we do have a sub domain for, development, purposes. And of course we add, hash just to make sure that the URL is unique, from the point of security, maybe you don't want the site to be exposed, but you can share that site with the client. So with the link, the site is accessible.

[00:12:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's really interesting. I love the premise of that. So obviously, I made up a year, maybe that's an exaggeration, but if you typically turn things around, let's say, I don't know, in a month or something like that, then that's a really credible offering, isn't it? The idea that you could do that completely for free, demonstrate it all to your clients, get it all signed off, and then click some buttons in the UI and.

You're off IndyStack is taking over. Sorry. I'm so fascinated by this. I'm going to keep talking about IndyStack. Oh, sorry. one other thing I want to ask is where I'm presuming it's a layer on top of some infrastructure, some, I don't know, maybe it's Google cloud or Amazon AWS or Azure or something like that.

Is that the case or is it that you've got your own servers? Let's just talk about that for a minute. Where is this, infrastructure actually, based?

[00:13:40] Raitis Sevelis: Yes. So we are, using existing infrastructure right now. It's a digital ocean Kubernetes, but we also now looking into Google cloud, Their, Kubernetes offer. Things may change, but of course only for good.

[00:13:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, nice. Okay. Wow, that's absolutely fascinating. thanks for that. one, one last time, IndyStack. com. if you want to look at the pricing, it's forward slash pricing and yeah, go check that out if that's piqued your interest. We're going to talk about something else and I'm going to divert you to another different website.

I'm going to divert you to, one called WP Racoon. Again, exactly as you'd imagine, WP Racoon, R A C O N. co not com it's co and you're going to find all sorts of articles and information, but I confess, I don't know too much about WP Racoon. So that's going to be my first point of contact, right?

is this your endeavor? Is this a company endeavor? What, is WP Racoon? And if it's yours, what was the point in launching it?

[00:14:48] Raitis Sevelis: Yes, so the first thing to mention, it's with 1c. That's not a typo. The, domain was actually taken, so I, had to figure something out.

[00:14:58] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, racoon 2 traditional? Is it usually got two C's? I didn't know that. Oh, okay, that's good to point out. Thank you.

[00:15:05] Raitis Sevelis: Yeah, that's my side project. At some point, There, there are things you want to discuss, you want to investigate, research, and, of course, share results with others. not everything could go under Visual Composer, WPBaker, or IndyStackBlog. it just doesn't fit there from the content perspective.

I decided why not to build a community on Facebook that can discuss plugins, discuss business around and inside WordPress. And of course, based on that, WP Racoon was, Made, to make sure that I have a platform where I can publish some of my researches regarding themes and plugins. And during those 10 years, there are things that are interesting to me that I am also able to share with, my audience.

[00:16:06] Nathan Wrigley: I think that's a really smart move because I often think to myself about WP builds. I often think, wouldn't it be nice if we could stray outside of WordPress for a couple of episodes and talk about Non wordpressy things. But given the nature of what I've set up, I've I've strapped myself in there a bit and I can't really do that because my audience is only WordPress, which is fine.

I'm entirely happy with that, but it does mean that I'm, limited in that sense. And, also, if you, as a person working for a variety of different companies, if you only ever produce that content. on their platform, should you ever move on from that, move on from one company to another, your content is siloed over there.

So I, I think that's a really smart move to set up something that's completely independent that you own. And it's not to say that you will move away from any of those companies. It's just nice to have your own space where you can have your own thoughts and be your authentic self. So yeah, good idea from my point of view, I think.

[00:17:10] Raitis Sevelis: yeah. And, my thoughts sometimes can be controversial and of course I, don't want to make anyone saying that, Even if I'm thinking a bit differently, that's the whole politics of the company I am working for. I have to some extent, full, ability to share anything that comes to my mind.

[00:17:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, Do you have to be, again, sorry, I'm straying into some really unusual area, but do you, be given that you do have an IndyStack hat and that you do have a WP Bakery and Visual Composer hat, do you have to, even on your own website, is there some Intuition in your head, which is saying, no, don't write that, because even though I want to write that and that's my authentic thought, I probably will cause a bit of chaos.

and the fallout from that will be, something, that I don't want to deal with.

[00:18:10] Raitis Sevelis: of course, yes, you, you need to balance and, you need to think. And of course, when I'm thinking about the content, first of all, I'm thinking about the content that can contribute to one of the products. And if, there is, okay, this is the content that, could not, no help the goal to reach the goals that we want, for.

One of the products, then is it the content that I'm still interested in and I want to push it live. And then of course, there are things that you may write about or maybe you would skip. That's, just how it works.

[00:18:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I know. You've got to be, you've got to be careful. It doesn't matter where you are. You've got to be careful. So WP Racoon, and obviously there's this website where you've got a load of articles. But also in the, in the main, navigation at the top, we can click on the community link. And the community takes us over to a Facebook group.

Now I, was once incredibly, engaged with Facebook and for, my own reasons, I've stepped away from that a little bit. Just, There's just thoughts in my head, which are not worth sharing. And I'm just wondering, what do you feel about that? Do you, are you happy to silo your content within Facebook?

Maybe you're not, maybe there's no unique content going there. It's just links and a community. How do you feel about, yeah, Facebook as a whole, as a place to put your community, because there's probably a lot of people listening to this who would love to have a community, whether it's WordPress or not, how's that, going?

[00:19:48] Raitis Sevelis: to me, Facebook probably was, always the main point of, communicating with, my friends, family and, work related and also WordPress community. of course, I'm registered on, on, on many social networks. So just name it, but, you just can't spend your time, everywhere. What, what I figured out that Facebook basically works for me that's, that's the one point of, truth where I can, basically work and spend my leisure time.

as for others net, other networks, It's, tricky. From time to time, I try different social networks, but, Yeah, the main point is that it requires effort on, my side. And as, as you mentioned, I'm sitting on several chairs. WP Bakery, Visual Composer, Indie Stack, yeah, WP Racoon, of course, Family, and, Now recently I started to...

give lectures at the local university.

[00:21:03] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, because you weren't busy enough, Reuters. Yeah,

[00:21:07] Raitis Sevelis: yeah, Facebook just works, let it put me, let it put that way.

[00:21:12] Nathan Wrigley: it was just, I have no axe to grind particularly about Facebook. I just got a little bit, I just found it was so compelling that I would sink so much time into Facebook and eventually some, some realization dawned on me that I just thought. Boy, if I, spent even half the amount of time on Facebook doing other stuff that probably I ought to be doing, then I'd be significantly more productive.

So it was my inability to restrain myself, which was really the cause. So as I said, no axe to grind, but go to the community tab. If you're interested in engaging with Writus and the WP Racoon community, and you are a Facebook member, then you can go over there, but let's, turn our attention to, to your history with WordPress in terms of.

Plugins because I want to point to a particular article that I noticed on your website about the thing that we all love WordPress plugins and, and all of the different pieces. So you've got a big backstory, 10 years or thereabouts dealing with WordPress. and it seems like it's growing, The WordPress marketplace is over 60,000 at the moment, plus goodness knows how many commercial plugins, what. Have you, what wisdom have you got for us in the, if, in the ecosystem of WordPress plugins?

[00:22:33] Raitis Sevelis: yeah, that's, a hard question. You have to think where to start. what I learned, and that's probably the main thing. If you have an idea for the plugin, just don't wait to polish the plugin. Once you create it, release it and talk to people, talk to community, ask for feedback. Maybe it will work.

Maybe it won't, but there is just like with any startup. You don't have to wait for Some special date, or wait when you think that the product, when your plugin is ready. the sooner you get it to the masses, the better.

[00:23:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's an interesting conundrum that, isn't it? Because I. Given what I now do, I've become a target for email campaigns from people, with new plugins, because, I have a podcast and people would like to come on the podcast and share the plugin. And it's quite interesting to me how, professional the WordPress plugin ecosystem has become.

And, so now, it's, so you've said launch it, build it, launch it, get on with it. It feels to me like nowadays, you also have to not just launch it from the code side. You also have to really think very carefully about. The marketing of a plugin, because I think that we're so exposed as WordPress users to slick, incredibly beautiful websites with very well thought out messaging and all of that, a fabulous logo, a fabulous website copy, which just speaks to me and explains my problem back to me and all of that kind of thing.

So I just wondered over the 10 years, if you've noticed that. Increasing professionalization. I don't even know if that's a word, but the, increasing professional nature of launching a plugin such that even if you've got an idea and you want to launch it, maybe. You need to think about that piece as well.

[00:24:47] Raitis Sevelis: Yeah, of course, marketing is always a huge thing, but, at the same time, I think what, also is happening is that finally we see that, before people try to, stick everything in, into one plugin, I say All in one thing. Now we're seeing that, plugins that succeed, solve one thing, but solve it really good.

And, this is probably the key to success because, it's a, it's not a bad thing to have plenty of plugins installed on your WordPress site, despite what anyone is telling. If those plugins are developed properly, there is no footprint on performance or anything. Just make sure to have a quality product installed on your WordPress site that solves your problems.

And, this is, this is what, Plugin and also scene developers should keep in mind

[00:25:53] Nathan Wrigley: I think it's really hard to be the company that rises to the top so the, the build it. And they will come days probably in the 2000 and tens, 2000 and elevens up to, I dunno, 2016, 17, something like that, launch a plugin and. People will migrate and flock to it. I feel that moment may have passed now because as, is in your infographic with 60, 000 plugins, if you're developing, Oh, let's pick something out of thin air.

If you're developing a calendar, booking plugin or something like that, it's fairly safe to say that there's. Probably half a dozen, maybe even a dozen competitors already. Whereas back in the early two thousands and, 2010, what have you, you could probably pick something fairly innovative and be more or less guaranteed that you were going to be the only person where now I think that's more of a struggle.

So I think that feeds into the bit that I was saying about marketing it. Is that you, are going to have to figure out what your competition are doing and figure out how they're positioning it and what their website looks like and how they're speaking to their clients and, so on. So yeah, the competition seems to be heating up.

[00:27:09] Raitis Sevelis: that's definitely looking on Competitors or potential competitors. That's part of product development Research phase you have to know what's good. What's bad about existing solutions and Your goal is basically to come with a solution yourself that addresses these things. This is Probably one of the keys to success and of course then communicate with the community why your solution is I wouldn't call it better but different from the existing ones So and then it comes down if there is an audience and that's something you should also answer During the research phase if there is an audience that requires that specific Feature or case to be solved then it's all good and you will definitely find your market

[00:28:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess it's just a question of launching it, doing your research beforehand and hoping that things come out that, that the audience do discover you. Obviously, there are things like blogs to be partnered with and podcasts to come on and videos to be made and all of that kind of stuff. But I still feel that it's a really healthy place to be, even though it may be more difficult than ever.

And I also feel that the pricing is becoming more realistic over the... Over the last several years, we've heard people talking repeatedly about, don't, assume that nobody's going to be willing to pay more than 49 a year or 100 a year or whatever. I feel that is becoming more typical, higher pricing.

So obviously you can get away with having less customers. If that's the case, I was reading an article in, I can't actually remember where it was. It may well have been, it was in the post status, blog, I think it was. And it was, Marika van der Acte, who was until recently the, the CEO of Yoast and she's now moved away.

And there, her and her husband Yoast from Yoast, have set up a venture capital fund called, Amelia and she made the point that she feels that the WordPress community is splitting itself in two a little bit. On the one hand, there's the, people who view the project not as a moneymaking enterprise, they're viewing it as a community thing.

they want to contribute to the core of the product. They want to attend WordPress events just to be with other like-minded people. And then over the last period of time, let's say decade or more, Businesses have stepped in and commoditized everything. And she feels that the community is being ripped into two halves and that the, that they're becoming further and further apart and finding it more and more difficult to talk to each other.

and I wondered if you had any thoughts on that, really, whether or not you've noticed that sort of same trend of you been attending WordPress events and thinking, boy, everybody here is trying to sell me something as opposed to, Oh, everybody's here is trying to just talk about WordPress, which is nice.

[00:30:15] Raitis Sevelis: Yes, of course, and I totally agree there are people that create products just to make money and that's the wrong approach and you when people approach you with that You can smell it

[00:30:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:30:36] Raitis Sevelis: the best products that, that, came to WordPress and in general, they were about solving issues for, for good, just to just the, products that were just developed for the community, to feel good, to be useful.

And, this is how you get to masses. This is how your product becomes popular. You can't really think from day one. Okay, I'm going to make money. If your product is great, if it's made for people, if it satisfies everyone and you're not that pushy, not just, walking around and selling it, then, success will be there. I know that, for WPBakery, for example, it wasn't about, money. It was about solving specific issue when people wanted to create more advanced layouts. They, were struggling with writing shortcodes. So they're. There we had that interface, visual interface to make that happen. It was not about from, day one just to make money, It was a product that was actually made to complement, our own WordPress themes. A bit different approach.

[00:32:01] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, interesting. So again, I'm going to keep that thread going a little bit. I'm looking at your infographic once more and I'm seeing that of the 60, 000. So I don't know exactly when that infographic was created, whether or not it's, it's one of your most recent blog posts. So I'm guessing it was reasonably recent.

60, 000 plugins are available on wordpress. org or more than 60, 000. I don't know what the exact number is. It probably rises inexorably, but 39. Of them, are really incredibly successful. 39 of those plugins have over a million active installs , which that's actually mind numbing still when you actually think about it.

39 products have got a million active installs. So that's from the repo. So that's the three version. But you also draw the conclusion that 95% of those plugins offer. Some sort of agency grade, license. So in other words, there's the free version on wordpress. org and there's the paid version. I, had no intuition that it was as big as that.

Honestly, if you'd asked me, I'd have said it was more like 50 50. So that's quite surprising to me that almost every plugin has a vehicle to make money off the back of it. That's somewhat surprising.

[00:33:16] Raitis Sevelis: yes, tot totally agree. When I was working on that infographic, of course, some data came in, and that was a surprise, oh, okay, didn't know that. But, on the other hand, how, plugins are getting popular? So you have to please, WordPress developers, agencies, people that are creating, websites or solutions for, others.

once the agency starts to work with your product, they, of course, deliver it to the clients. And these can be non technical people. But, then later on, they decided that they need another website. So they are familiar with your product. So they will choose your product. They will maybe, if they are working with, some new agency, they will tell you, tell that agency that, Hey.

We want that product and this is how you grow your business, your plugin business or theme business. Of course, as a WordPress product developer, you have to think how to make sure that, that your product is a good fit for agencies and developers.

[00:34:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess the adage here is that a rising tide carries all boats with it, so if, WordPress is, if WordPress's user base continues to rise, then it's okay for the number of plugins in the marketplace to, to go up and all of that. However, I wonder, in the more recent past, we, stagnation is really the wrong word, but we've, we seem to have seen A sort of, a turnaround a little bit.

So rather than that number continually going up into the mid forties and approaching 50 percent of the CMS marketplace, we seem to see it stalling and perhaps going down one or two percentage points. So maybe there's, a little trouble, ahead. I don't know if you've got any intuitions on that, whether you believe that WordPress will continue to gain traction in the market or whether or not maybe it's, maybe it's, heyday has gone.

[00:35:30] Raitis Sevelis: It is, as you said, it is still growing, but, also you mentioned that it is slowing down a bit, and if, recently I was, talking at, the WordPress meetup, in Lithuania, and I had the data that, if you compare, growth for the last, three years, WordPress has grew something around, 15 percent while, for example, Big Squarespace, Weebly's, Shopify, their gross rate is around, 50%, 75%.

And of course they are like far behind. But, but still what, will happen next, they can get closer. And this is, this is the question of how, how ready we are. What do we do about, making WordPress, accessible and available to, more people? Because, there was this Forbes, Review, which is, of course, out of the community scope where, we as WordPress users, please WordPress.

So it was like... independent and they were telling that, Hey, WordPress is really great. It's, the flexibility is there and you can create anything. But, at the same article, they were mentioning that if you want to create something more advanced or maybe a bit out of the box, then you need to know how to code, then you need to, be technical and, If we look on, on, on a regular WordPress site, there are 25, different, Plugins, on average, plus minus. in many cases, that's 25 different user interfaces and user experience. for an average person who is non technical and who are those people that are deciding either they should go to WordPress or maybe stick with Wix.

That's, that's a deal breaker often. We need to basically address those things, not only WordPress core. So guys are working on the new admin panel, which is, something I'm really waiting for,

[00:37:55] Nathan Wrigley: great. I just, there are bits of it, which I can't see working in the implementation that I've seen in the screenshots, but boy, do we need that? We need some refresh there,

[00:38:04] Raitis Sevelis: we need the, last update of like a major update in admin panel was actually almost, 10 years ago.

[00:38:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

Yeah.

[00:38:14] Raitis Sevelis: the day I joined WordPress. So the difference, I haven't seen really

[00:38:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. In the entirety of the time I've used WordPress, I think the only modification has been the sort of a modification from a dark blue to a sort of paler blue in, in, active states on links. That's about the only thing I can point to. Everything else is about the same.

Anyway. Sorry, I interrupted.

[00:38:38] Raitis Sevelis: Yeah. But, I would say there is also this, top navigation bar that's, also, that was added later on. But the version 3.0 was when, the last major update happened. So I'm really waiting for that and that should help. And if, product, people stick more to consistency, when it comes to user interface.

Talk about, not only talk, but work with accessibility. This should improve.

[00:39:13] Nathan Wrigley: I think this is such an important discussion because if we want WordPress to maintain, okay, let's even imagine that we don't want it to grow. We just want it to stay where it is. Let's in the, low 40 percent of the CMS market, I feel a, the onboarding. of WordPress needs to be for the, for a typical non developer user, it needs to be really straightforward.

And so obviously things like IndyStack are taking that on, you you, come over here and you click some buttons in a nice UI and there's your WordPress website. But then that piece of the puzzle seems to be being solved by the market. But now when we get into the WordPress admin, as you said, it.

is looking tired compared to commercial rivals, Wix, Squarespace and all of that who have really beautiful UIs and they're in charge of all of that so they can update it on an annual, weekly, whatever basis. But then, like you said, it's really Confusing when you go in and your form plugin hijacks the entire interface and it's got a different set of fonts, the buttons all look different, and you're thinking, what have I bought here, what is this, still WordPress or is this something else, and then you go to your, I don't know, whatever plugin you've got for whatever task, and it looks different, so I think the endeavors to update the admin UI So that it looks modern and it's, it competes visually from a UI UX perspective with the commercial rivals.

That's really important. But I, really think that it's incumbent upon all the developers of plugins to try and come to some consensus about the way things are going to look. I don't know if you saw recently, I'm back to Yoast again. They, released their sort of UI kit because they were, it was fed up, is the right word. They were so fed up with the limitations that they had within WordPress, they wanted something more modern. So they released that and open sourced it. Whether or not that'll get taken on, we'll have to see. But the idea that a non technical end user would come in and not be confused by WordPress is just unrealistic.

I wonder how many people have walked away from WordPress within minutes just going, I just hate the way this looks. I don't know what I'm doing. It's all very confusing.

[00:41:29] Raitis Sevelis: yes, and, I totally agree with that. it can be confusing and, It all comes down to shoulders of, product people and community, of course, and also core, core developers. Core developers basically can give a bit of, a bit more, instruments, a bit more, like UI components that can be used, by, product people to create their own, user interface.

Because why people choose to create their own user interface, is because of lack of, those default components.

[00:42:17] Nathan Wrigley: right.

[00:42:18] Raitis Sevelis: on the community side, it's all, About creating content that's, that educate, people and of course doing some extra steps. Sometimes, as, as simple as, helping your clients assign, domains to, to, to their hosting services.

Simple thing but for an average person, that's that could be a nightmare

[00:42:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, it just, I think this is the problem of our time actually in the WordPress community. I think this is the piece which needs to be tackled. Yeah, there's a, few others that which you could throw in the mix. there's all sorts of projects which need addressing, but this one does feel like a really important one if we want the community to grow.

Dear listener, a question for you. If I was to ask you how many plugins as a percentage come from the United States, I wonder what your answer would be. I would have gone for something like 30%, something like that. As your investigation leads us, this is phenomenal. 60 percent of plugins, herald from the U S I honestly would have thought places like India would have been capturing.

Giant chunks of that, because I see, plugins coming at such an incredible pace from places like India and what have you. I'm surprised by that. And I wonder if that's in decline. I wonder if we were to go back a few years, if 70 percent would have been the case and it's going to dwindle over time.

[00:43:51] Raitis Sevelis: I was surprised but that by that number as well. I guess that's We don't have that historic data. I don't have that historic data, but I guess that the percentage was higher since wordpress, initially came from the United States, they put that way, but, of course there are new products that, come from Europe, from, Asia, all around the world.

this percentage of, market dominating by, by the U. S. companies will change. At the same time, we see plenty of acquisitions happening in WordPress. And, Usually that's a bigger player taking, under their wings, some, new, exciting, products. I don't have data, but, I guess that the majority of those, large companies still come from the U.

S. So that's also how. how this percentage gets determined.

[00:45:09] Nathan Wrigley: really interesting. I would imagine if we were to revisit this conversation in five years. hopefully the number of plugins will have gone up and the community will have grown, but also I imagine that number from the US will have gone down and we'll be looking at different countries, taking a more pivotal role, some of the data, which I'll just throw at you because it's really interesting from this, and then we'll get some less satisfactory data, which is buried at the end of the infographic.

roughly 50 percent of, plugins that have an upsell use Woo or Edd, in order to get their plugin into your hands. That. That comes as no surprise, I wonder what the other 50 percent are using, they're probably rolling it in their own way, using something like Freemius or, I don't know, PayPal or Paddle or something like that.

0. 61 percent of users leave a review on wordpress. org, oh boy, you go to all this effort. To, to promote your channel on wordpress. org and less than just over half of 1 percent will be leaving a review. 58%, offer 14 or 30 day refund policies. That's quite nice. 26 percent do not offer any refund option.

That's interesting and a bit strange. 60, Oh Lord, this, I don't like this statistic. Only 60 percent of plugins, 60 percent keep their plugins updated. That is astonishing. So there's 40 percent out there which are not getting updated either because they've stopped in development and they're no longer being used or they just released it and walked away from it.

That's alarming. I'm going to, I'm going to pass that one over to you.

[00:46:45] Raitis Sevelis: yeah, so there are two sides of a coin. Of course, if, for maintaining, your WordPress plugin, you need to have resources. And, if your product is not that popular, if it serves, a really small niche, at some point, you either sell it or, You just can't really maintain it from the business perspective.

So that's, that's worrying, but this is, this is, how, life goes. So what can be done there, is maybe opening that a bit more to the community. I guess there, there are people, in the community that would love to contribute to some specific plugin. maybe because they are using it or they like the idea and so on.

So this is how we can make sure that, really good niche plugins don't, die at, the end of the day.

[00:47:51] Nathan Wrigley: 60 percent though, I'm surprised. it's as, low as that. I would have thought the updating would have been much more regular. I suppose that's a bit of caveat emptor, buyer beware when you're buying plugins, it's up to you to do your due diligence and check out what the history is and what that company is about and how long they've been doing things and check the changelog and all of those kinds of things to see how updated they are, but you're right, what's the point in.

Banging your head against, a plugin that's only got a handful of installs and you simply cannot keep it going. That's part of the, that's part of the nature of the beast. If we were in the SAS landscape, that would simply stop working and you wouldn't have access to it, at least. In the WordPress space, you could fork it, if you wanted, and keep it updated yourself if it's pivotal to your business.

One last statistic, just before we knock it on the head, and this is, oh, this is so depressing for want of a better word. 90 percent of plugins do not pass accessibility tests. Accessibility seems like The, the conversation of the moment, it feels three years ago, we were all talking about core web vitals and before that other things, but now it seems that accessibility has taken the helm.

I'm hoping that this statistic comes down because this is such an important topic,

[00:49:12] Raitis Sevelis: I think there is no other way. Because, from the government perspective, we... We have, new rules introduced, from time to time that pushes actually people to address accessibility issues. And, also... I, was thinking, about accessibility wrong for a very long time because, to me, accessibility issues were, related to people with, let's say some really huge disabilities, but, recent data shows that.

30 percent of people over 50 in the U. S. experience some sort of a disability, which may restrict them from using, some products that are not really addressing accessibility issues. And, these are huge numbers. And everyone who is, younger, let's say, and using WordPress, after I don't know, 30?

20? 10 years, you will get to the point where you have those 30 percent chance to also have accessibility issues. So that's basically when you think about accessibility. You think about solving problems not only for others, but also solving problems for yourself in the future.

[00:50:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we've talked, touched on this topic on so many occasions on the podcast. We've had all sorts of people coming on talking about how to make your. Your website accessible, but I don't think we've ever really covered off the, how to make your plugin accessible. So that in itself is quite an interesting subject, but I do feel like you alluded to that, I feel the law is going to be the driving force here because certainly in, in the UK and in Europe and North America, I can't really speak for other parts of the world.

I just don't know the. The, law is going to at some point firm up to the point where you really won't be able to get away with this if you endeavor to have a product online, you might even find yourself at the end of a lawsuit if you don't do this. So I'm encouraged that statistic is not 100%, but let's hope that if you produce this infographic again at some point in the near future, it will start to drive down and be, yeah, even if that's driven by a stick and not a carrot, if the law is.

the thing that forces you to do it, but nevertheless, that's still at this point a fairly disheartening statistic. I think we've gone through the infographics. Writus, we've got to about 50 minutes roughly. Wow, where does the time go when we record these episodes? I've no idea. Writus, where would we find you?

We've heard about Indystat, we've heard about WP Bakery, and Visual Composer, and obviously WP Racoon. You mentioned that you're on all the socials. If we're keen to chat to you, what's, the best way? Is it good old email or is it Twitter or whatever it's called nowadays?

[00:52:18] Raitis Sevelis: Yeah, I would say if, you want to reach out first, you can knock on any doors of IndyStack, Visual Composer and WP Bakery, if you have some general questions, you can ask right away, through the channels available there, or just, Specifically mentioned. Hey, I want to talk to writers.

[00:52:39] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.

[00:52:40] Raitis Sevelis: I will be there.

also of course, WP Racoon community on, on Facebook.

[00:52:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yes.

[00:52:47] Raitis Sevelis: this, is probably where you can reach out. Easily. I, have a Facebook tab, opened throughout the day and, one of the first things I do in the morning, checking out what's, happening. That's my sometimes source of news and, also making sure that, okay, planning out my day and seeing whom I should talk to and so on.

[00:53:13] Nathan Wrigley: I have no idea how you get anything done with Facebook. That is literally, that's, the, for me, that's absolutely going to destroy my day. Bravo for you for being able to be so self disciplined. That's amazing. That is by the way, it's a URL, which is easy to remember. If you want to join the WP Racoon, it's facebook.

com forward slash groups, plural, forward slash WP Racoon with one C and two O's. So go and join them there. Or. Go to any of the other places where you can find Raitus. Raitus Sevelis, thank you so much for chatting to me on the podcast today. I really appreciate it.

[00:53:53] Raitis Sevelis: Thank you, Nathan. It was a pleasure as always.

[00:53:56] Nathan Wrigley: You're very, kind.

Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. Very nice chatting to Raitis. What a wide ranging discussion that was. If you have any commentary about that, please feel free to head over to WP Builds.com. Search for episode number 362, and leave us a comment there. It seems so, so worthwhile to use the WordPress commenting system rather than posting it all over on social media. So I would implore you, do that. 362 is the episode. Go search for that at WP Builds.com.

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