Insights from the 2023 State of Enterprise WordPress Survey

Brad:
Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Enterprise WordPress Podcast, Scaling Enterprise. This is The Inside Track edition of the podcast, which I’m very excited to dig into. So on this show, we’re really digging into enterprise WordPress, of course, but really within the community, within WordPress, what’s happening, what’s going on with Enterprise? Who’s launching cool sites, what kind of crazy functionality or examples within the enterprise have we seen to really kind of validate what WordPress can do at scale within these large organizations? So I’m really excited to dig into a new show. So I have brought on a couple of my friends, good friends on the show. So let’s meet them and then we’ll dive right into it. First up, we got Mr. Tom over there at Human Made. Tom, why don’t you tell everybody who you are and what you do, especially around the enterprise side of WordPress?

Tom:
Sure. Well, if folks listen to the episode we put out a couple of weeks ago, which was with Karim, you might remember me from that. If not, plug, go and listen to it. It was a great episode. I’m the co-founder and CEO of Human Made. Also, one of the founding members of Scale Consortium. Been doing Enterprise WordPress for coming on 15 years or so. So got plenty of scars and stories to tell.

Brad:
Lots of stories to tell. We can’t wait to get into some of those stories, the ones you’re allowed to share outside those NDAs. Right. And next up, of course, we have Mario. Mario, why don’t you introduce yourself.

Mario:
Hey everyone. First off, pleased to be here. Great crowd. I’ve known you guys for over a decade now, maybe close to 15 years. My name is Mario Peshev. I run several different companies. One of them is DevriX, it’s a WordPress Boutique Agency, profiling in small and medium enterprises. Even though we work with some Fortune one thousands, we used to work with Meta, automotive companies, banks, telecom. So Enterprise is very dear to my heart. If it wasn’t for Enterprise, I wouldn’t have discovered WordPress. Well, and I wouldn’t have stuck long enough in WordPress if it wasn’t for Enterprise either. So that’s definitely something I love talking about.

Brad:
Awesome. And I’m especially excited because not only do we know each other, we all run our own agencies. We’ve been doing this for, well longer than 10 years, over a decade. But I also think it’s interesting because of just our locations within the world and especially kind of bringing not only experiences within WordPress online but also where we live. So I’m in Philadelphia. I’m on the east coast in the United States. Tom, where are you at?

Tom:
I am in France. So currently enjoying the Olympics originally from the UK.

Brad:
Are you at the Olympics?

Tom:
Well, I want to say I’m at the Olympics right now.

Brad:
Are you living in France now? I didn’t even realize you moved.

Tom:
I do live in France. Yeah, I’ve lived here for a couple of years now.

Brad:
You are a big Olympics fan if you moved there two years ahead just to get ready for it. That’s cool. Mario, you’re a little bit further over there, right? Where are you at?

Mario:
Not too far off from Tom right now I’m in Bulgaria, which is just one time zone ahead, but we used to be a little further apart when you used to live in the UK, right, Tom?

Tom:
Exactly. Yeah,

Brad:
A little closer. But yeah, I think it’s just having not only a perspective, like I said, of what we do online because it’s amazing that we can connect this. I’m still blown away by technology and that we can just kind of get together and chat about things. So it’s got to be a lot of fun. I think we’re going to have different perspectives as well with our clients and just our experiences. So let’s jump in. I know we’ve got a lot of big topics you want to kind of dive into and talk about. The first one that I really, I like to ask people this and people ask me this a lot too, but I think it’s a fun question. It’s really just defining enterprise specifically within the WordPress world, right? It’s such a big, it’s just a heavy word, right? Enterprise. What does that mean? I’d love to hear, I think each one of us maybe take a turn and just kind of in our own words, when someone says enterprise or enterprise WordPress, what does that mean to you? How do you describe WordPress within the enterprise? And Tom, you want to kick us off?

Tom:
Sure. I mean, probably in its simplest form inside the WordPress space, usually it just means big stuff, right? Big projects or big companies or something. Probably that’s how we all first came across it. WordPress is starting to be used for more serious stuff. I think also you can think in the broader software world, enterprise often just means customized, not going to take it off the shelf. You go on the pricing page, it says a hundred bucks a month, 200 bucks a month contact us. Enterprise is the contact us option.

Brad:
It’s the no price listed option, right?

Tom:
No price listed option. There’s no off the shelf plan for you. You need to customize it. And so you need to work with, often you need to work with one of our service providers to do that. I think in the enterprise CMS space, you can often think of the difference as being enterprises need a platform. They don’t really think of it as we want a website and what’s the CMS? We need a website. They think we need a platform to power all our websites to power all the stuff we’re doing to integrate with all the stuff we are using to fit with all of our workflows, hence the need for it to be heavily customized. So I guess, yeah, probably that’s how I’d think about it.

Brad:
Yeah. Mario, let’s see your take and I’ll give you mine and we’ll see if we’re all thinking the same way, if we’re laying a little different.

Mario:
Yeah, I love the definition of enterprise being the cost plan. It’s always custom. You always talk to an enterprise sales rep. You always have a custom quote, an RFP, and presentations, index, and stuff. And the reason you do that is you’re talking to 12 different stakeholders. You have to escalate to the board and get approved from the CFO and it’s just slow to this process. If we have to get super literal, once again enterprises, it comes from Latin and then it goes to French. And I don’t speak French, so Tom can correct me, but it comes from, what is it, entrepreneur or so, which is like to undertake or however it’s translated. Tom, do you know the actual definition? You’ve been living there for two years.

Tom:
I don’t know the old French definition of enterprise unfortunately, but I’ll do my research for the next show.

Mario:
There we go. But yeah, I mean essentially it is just to undertake and we are all entrepreneurs, right? Because we start new businesses, we undertake actions. So semantically speaking, even one person company is an enterprise. Realistically speaking, we have micro-enterprises up to 10 people or a certain revenue cap. Then we have small enterprises up to 50 people, small-medium enterprises up to 250, and then they just keep scaling up in the grand scheme of things. Looking at the top of the chart, I always take a look at like s and p 500 or NASDAQ companies. Most of the FAANG companies, they do have hundreds of thousands of employees. Amazon I believe is probably the largest out of the tech at least. They used to pick at about 1.5 million staff members and now they’re at 1.3, 1.4. But we are talking about tens, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of team members, which of course, if you can imagine org chart, it gets to lots of different C levels and VPs and senior VPs and then directors and supervisors and all these kind of trailing down. So the difference between a small startup project and an enterprise, I usually speak to more people. You have to take more decisions, you have to deal with data privacy, security, scalability, and lots of other different considerations that you may not necessarily be dealing with in a small team environment. How about you, Brad?

Brad:
Yeah, I kind of go back to how Tom simplifies it, like big WordPress, that’s how I’ve always described it. Big WordPress, big challenges, big goals, big needs. When I say big, it may not be that what they might need is necessarily a big lift to build, but when you build something in the enterprise for a big conglomerate or big company, things take a lot more work to do, even simple tasks. So I think big, it’s not always this massively complex customized system. It just means building things in that are going to scale in the enterprise. They’re going to handle the traffic, they’re going to meet all those really strict security requirements, accessibility requirements, all these things that every company out there is important to them. But they need agencies like ours to help them through that, navigate through that, especially when it comes to WordPress. But yeah, I love to hear, I think most people think when you hear enterprise, it’s like Microsoft or it’s just these biggest of the biggest, the whatever, the s and p 100. But it could

be quite a bit bigger than that. I honestly think, Tom, you guys do a lot of work with universities and stuff. I think a lot of the universities, I consider enterprise because they have big needs and big challenges. They certainly have enterprise needs.

A lot of content that they’re trying to figure out how to make it in a way that people can find what they need, which is probably one of the biggest challenges for universities and even local government is the sheer size of content they have to have out there and then make it easy to find what you’re looking for. But yeah, that’s how I kind of define it. I think it’s a big term because it should be, but it can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, which we’ll talk about a little bit. The state of enterprise survey that went out, we’ll get into that, but the way it’s defined within the survey, which I thought was pretty good too, is a high profile brand, a publisher with a national and or global audience or a corporate conglomerate. So I think that kind of helps summarize it too, but it’s really big WordPress big needs.

So why is enterprise and WordPress so important? Why are we talking about it? Especially when I say we, I mean not just the three of us on the show, but agencies that really help build WordPress at scale within the enterprise. Obviously this is important to us, but why is it important for the larger community within WordPress? Why is enterprise, why are we focused so much on it? Why are we spending so much time? I almost try to help grow WordPress within the enterprise, help corporations realize that it’s a great product that can compete with anything that they’re using, but why is it because the majority of people that use WordPress could care less about the enterprise, right? This is a very small percentage of WordPress builders and users that would be considered in this space. So the big question is why is it important for WordPress that we’re actually talking about the enterprise and trying to get more people to adopt WordPress within the enterprise? I’ll just open it up, whoever wants to jump in.

Mario:
Well, so from where I stand, one of the reasons is the versatility of WordPress as a platform. So when we take a look at different software applications or tools or so, we do have a pretty broad spectrum of a single creator or a solopreneur type of systems and very high scale enterprise solutions out there. And WordPress is one of the very few platforms that is able to serve both at the same time. There are certain, and I’m probably not going to name specific names or so, but just the Indie hacker solopreneur tools that are one personality. They don’t have a team plan. You cannot add more members. There’s no security data, privacy support and stuff. It’s just one single person can use that. All the freelancers or single individual people. And then there’s the Adobes, the sales forces and all the other corporations building pretty hardcore tools, think of SAP, you cannot deploy an SAP as an ERP for any organization that has fewer than I would say, 500 people probably if you’re 200, maybe you can use it and not spend the 20 people’s time, full-time operating DRP.

But for the most part, you need to be a massive conglomerate to be able to use that. And unlike all of these, WordPress is probably the one, and if not one and only one of the very few ones, Drupal may probably fall in the same camp, but the one that’s super suitable for starting out being a freelancer or photographer or a journalist or blogger or so, but then at the same time serving universities and NASA and the White House and all the other different segments covering the enterprise. So the reason it’s so important is historically speaking in 2003, when WordPress started, it started as a blogging platform. It wasn’t supposed to be the go-to enterprise tool, while other players in the market were, that’s how they started. This was the pivot, this was the goal. And now we are managing, what is it, 43.5% or so of the web, but our enterprise coverage is still limited because we’re not talking enough about all the capabilities and opportunities of WordPress, which is why lots of enterprise are just not considering WordPress as one of the suitable tools to use, which is a shame. And that’s essentially why we have to talk more about that.

Tom:
I mean, that probably speaks to the opportunity and challenge for WordPress and why it’s so important. In some ways, as you said, Brad, the majority of users aren’t enterprise users. It’s a fairly small user base, but actually as an economic segment of the WordPress economy or something, enterprise is actually huge. I dunno what the stats would be, but I imagine it’s up there, maybe hosting and e-commerce or something is larger, but probably after that, the enterprise part of the ecosystem is probably the third largest or something. And so the amount of money and resources that bring into the ecosystem is pretty large. And we see that the number of enterprise agencies that contribute means core or something. Again, it’s fairly sizable. So I think that’s just one factor. I think part of its importance is just the outside influence it has and the outside role it has to play.

I think in WordPress, I think also just the fact that these well-known brands, sure, maybe you’re just moving one website to WordPress when you’re doing NASA, but it’s such a well-known brand, it has this huge impact actually out in the market in terms of WordPress being taken seriously. I mean, one of the things I love about WordPress is that NASA are using WordPress core. You as a freelance photographer can go and download WordPress core and you get the same thing. That’s actually really not true. SAP is a good example. You wouldn’t want to use SAP if you were a freelance photographer, but you couldn’t even if you wanted to. There’s not that many products actually where that’s true, where you really get the same product. And so I think that’s another reason why it’s important. All of the innovation that happens at the enterprise tier can flow down and be available to everybody, which is really cool.

Brad:
Yeah, I mean that’s a great point. The innovation, and especially from open source, the more we contribute, we as a community within the WordPress project, the more anyone contributes, the better the project’s going to be, the better the software. And so the enterprise is bringing where we see those contributions, which many of these large organizations are starting to get into more, which is awesome. But we’re starting to see where they’re more focused on these areas that smaller sites would never even maybe run into those problems. Like the scalability side of it, right? The site’s going to have a million posts in one month, is that going to scale? So being able to contribute, you can go in there and actually help WordPress if there are bottlenecks, of course we know it can scale and can handle that, right? Especially if you have the right host and server setup.

But understanding if there are bottlenecks, I can think of a specific one. This was back, I don’t know, eight, 10 years ago. But as multi-site was starting to get more popular, networks were getting bigger, and WordPress was having a real challenge handling large networks. So if you imagine you have a thousand sites in your network and you got a network dropdown list, it would just bomb because it was trying to load all these sites. And same with users. If you had a million users, WordPress would just break because you couldn’t load a million. It would just break trying to pull that data back. These sites that were basically pushing WordPress to its limits, expose those limits. And now we have as a community worked on that and made it so it does scale. You can have an unlimited amount of users, unlimited amount of sites in the network, and it’s not just going to blow up, it’s going to work. And that all came from these larger builds, kind of pushing the limits and then discovering, Hey, we got to fix this. This isn’t going to scale if we don’t do something about it. And now it’s like I said, we’ve all seen it at scale on these massive networks or massive sites. So I love that idea of just those larger problems trickling down and hopefully being fixed within the enterprise teams and contributing back. That’s the number one thing. If they’re not contributing back then open source isn’t going to work anyways, right?

Tom:
I mean, I think we’ve seen that play out right where it used to be. I mean, I think probably one of the reasons why Enterprise WordPress is kind of synonymous with just big WordPress is actually it was quite hard to do big WordPress back in the day. And so a lot of the stuff we were solving then as enterprise-like service providers was just scale and performance. But actually a lot of that has been solved. Now it’s not particularly hard to run WordPress at scale. And that’s thanks to that work trickling down being fed back directly and now we can focus on other stuff, which is cool.

Brad:
And going back to another point, I think, Tom, you might’ve made around kind of validating WordPress, you mentioned NASA, Whitehouse.gov, probably the number one, probably the most targeted government website in the world, probably one of ‘em at least, if not number one, is running WordPress. So being able to say that with full confidence as an agency owner trying to validate WordPress to an enterprise, there’s a lot of value behind

that, right? No, we didn’t build that site, but somebody did it. It’s amazing. And it’s on WordPress, right? NASA is doing it. Whitehouse.gov is doing it. You can do it. Microsoft’s running it. Their whole security team does an annual audit of WordPress. If Microsoft says it’s okay to run it, it’s probably okay for you. So it helps validate and make these conversations easier, especially as we’re trying to bring WordPress to the table for a lot of these organizations.

Because I think, Mario, you mentioned earlier about Adobe, AEM. I can remember sales pitches where I’m sitting there in a boardroom of Viacom pitching WordPress and why all their sites should be on WordPress and some weren’t, and they’re trying to figure out what they wanted to go all in on. And then right behind us was Adobe with about 30 people, multiple professors of data science coming up there showing all, and I’m like, versus my much smaller team, I’m like, how do we compete? And that was where it was really eyeopening that we need to collectively within this community, those of us that are in the WordPress space, we need to work together. We need to put our voices together, our thoughts together and help lift WordPress into the enterprise base, which is exactly what we’re doing here, right? Exactly what Scale Consortium is doing, what we’re doing here, working with the WordPress core team and contributors, because now we’re working on the WordPress dot org slash enterprise page.

If you didn’t know that exists, go check it out. Not a ton to look at yet, but I promise you we’re working on it. And so it’s nice to see that things are happening because even just a couple of years ago, none of this, there wasn’t an enterprise page. We were all on our own trying to pitch WordPress and realizing that’s not going to get us where we need to go. So that’s why it’s important because WordPress actually grows because of the enterprise, just like it grows from small businesses using it. So it is a good thing for all of us.

I want to mention a little bit about the state of the Enterprise WordPress survey. So this has gone around and it was from 2023, so obviously we’re a little past the halfway mark of 2024, but I think it’s interesting to look at it retrospectively, but also I wanted to also highlight the fact that the 2024 survey is also live. So if you have not seen it, definitely go. It’s SOEWP.com, state of enterprise WordPress. SOEPW.com is where you can take the 2024 survey, but you can also view the results of last year’s survey. This is really spearheaded by a number of agencies. I think Big Bite and Human Made, you guys were pretty involved in this, and I know a lot of us were helping promote it because it’s getting data back, but essentially they interviewed approximately over a hundred corporations enterprise what would be considered enterprise level companies, enterprise brands, I should say Macy’s, NewsCorp. These are big, these are enterprise, right? Big WordPress the Times, and it got some really interesting data back. So if you guys have any data points that stand out, there are a few that stood out to me that I thought we should touch on, but if there’s any other data points you want to talk about, please, let’s do it because it’s interesting. I love this type of data. I haven’t seen this before specifically on WordPress and Enterprise, so just having anything to talk about and look at it I think is really interesting. Yeah,

Tom:
I mean that’s the first thing. I think before we get to the actual results, I think that this is such a great example of something that doesn’t happen unless we all get together and do it right, that we actually have a real lack of data underpinning what we’re doing and pooling our resources to put something like this together. It’s not actually a huge amount of work and it can bring a lot of value even though this one is a few months past now, it’s the first one. So actually we can learn a lot from it.

Brad:
In the next one. I would expect now that people know it’s there, I’m sure some people missed it. And now on the WordPress dot org slash enterprise page, they have linked it up with a nice banner at the bottom. So I would expect we’ll have quite a bit more data points for the next one. So definitely share it. If you listen to the show, check it out, share it with anyone, especially corporations that might actively want to fill this out. It can really help shape some of the future of WordPress, especially at the enterprise side.

Tom:
What stood out to you from the actual results?

Brad:
So the one that stood out to me, I think really just like the important factors of choosing WordPress. This is something, as an agency owner, I like to know this. Why did they choose WordPress? What were the items that kind of pushed them over the edge? I think cost is always going to be one of those things that’s always going to be a bit of a factor. But when you’re in the enterprise, WordPress is probably one of the cheaper options when you really think about licensing and costs and Adobe and Sitecore and some others versus WordPress. WordPress is generally going to come out on top, probably almost in every case. It’s going to come out on top from a cost perspective. But the number one thing on this list in terms of what was the most important was functionality followed by scalability, extensibility, and usability.

So it’s really about the flexibility of WordPress, which I guess that makes sense. That’s probably what I would assume too, but the WordPress is so flexible, scalable that they can really extend it to do what they need to do. And that is the core of enterprise because WordPress is not going to just install it and it’s ready for the enterprise. There is a lot you have to do to kind of get it ready. And a lot of that is customizations. And a lot of that’s really specific to the organization you’re working with because again, they have such unique setups and unique systems, and most of them, they may be on a WP engine or WordPressVIP, but many of them are not. A lot of them are still hosting their own stack or maybe they have their own hardware, which I know sounds crazy, but some of these organizations do because how they can control everything about what’s on that and who has control over that data, which is important to them. But on the flip side, something that caught my attention was the fact that multilingual capabilities were not as important, which I thought was kind of surprising. Every larger corporation I worked with, multilingual capabilities were important. Having localized content, especially in any region, there’s a global presence, an office or something of that company, but I’m really surprised it was over 57% said it’s not important. Over half said it’s not important. Yeah.

Tom:
Well, what’s your take on that, Mario? I wonder if that gels with what you would assume the importance of multilingual would be?

Mario:
Well, and that’s something that made an impression on me as well. So my personal way I’m interpreting this at least is first off, we do have a pretty sizable percentage of publishers here in that specific survey. So I would say that when we’re considering national publishers, particularly in, let’s say, the States or the UK or post-Australia, they wouldn’t be focusing that much on multilingual. That’s kind of one thing that stands out. We’ve been working with different, again, enterprises primarily in North America, they don’t care that much about multilingual. And again, as someone who lived in Europe, and my language, I’m not a native English speaker, I can totally understand how important this may be in certain scenarios. Again, you guys have worked with Microsoft or some of the other top orgs that have 12 languages in the dropdown by default. So for some that’s important, but this may not necessarily be the most integral factor here.

The other thing that stands in mind that kind of stuck up here is I believe that they fully realize the power of workplace multi-site and the ability to launch different instances for different regions for sites because it’s pretty common in enterprise. Most if you go to Nike or the Louis Vuitton brand, you land on the landing page with lots of flags and say, Hey, which country? And then it leads you to some form of a localized website. So these are completely different standalone instances. And I think this is also pretty important to recognize enterprise are not afraid of maintaining 20 different websites, even though they may look alike and just run a DevOps tooling to upgrade all this at the same time, unlike what we do ourselves. But a couple of other things that stood out in the survey, first off, and Brad kind of briefly touched on that, but functionality like 70% of the IS functionality was very important.

This was the leading factor. 70% said WordPress is there for functionality. And I think we are not talking about this enough when I think of what are the options for an enterprise, they can go with a hosted kind of CMS through show, which of course it is hosted. It has a limited finite number of integrations, modules, developers through show. They can do bespoke, build a team and build something for three years and spend like $12 million just building a bespoke system and then still don’t have integrations or they can go open source. And when I think of open source, I just can’t think of any better solution that has, again, the flexibility

, versatility, integration, feature set number of plugins or API integrations, we show it to WordPress. So I think this is pretty important. And last but not least, or actually two things, but I’ll try to do it real quick. First off is build cost. So 22% of the service that they build their enterprise MVP, like less than 50 grand. I challenge any enterprise to do the same with any other platform whatsoever.

Brad:
Is that a one-pager?

Mario:
Well, yeah, maybe just a mockup. Maybe just a mockup. If their creative team doesn’t waste four times on charting a log or something.

Brad:
It’s just a strategy phase

Mario:
And hosting costs. We get lots of enterprises migrating to us because they say, Hey, we find it better to pay, let’s say 10 grand a month retainer for you to changes because we pay more for hosting. So we are paying 15 grand, 20 grand or so for just keeping the lights on, no custom development or changes or human contact whatsoever. And we believe we can bring our hosting down to 2 to 5k a month and spend the other 10k and to essentially incur zero costs whatsoever and actually get professional development behind. So comparing that with what it actually costs, maintaining an enterprise system once it’s already there is something that is a place where WordPress really shines.

Brad:
Yeah, I mean they’re all good points for sure. I did pick up on the cost thing and it’s hard to say less than 50,000, whatever that was, but there are smaller projects within Enterprise. But yeah, like you said, there’s usually a lot more hoops you have to jump through. So even a simple website turns into a much larger lift and build. The one area I think we really as a community need to work on or maybe as an enterprise we need to work on is contributing. So if you look at does your organization contribute to open source, 62% said no, just flat out, nope, we do not contribute. Now I do think you should take that with a grain of salt because that holds true if they’re not working with an agency, if they’re not working with outside partners, if it’s just their development team within their organization, they’re not contributing.

That’s a flat no. However, I bet this is a little bit mixed bag, right? Where the no is, no, we don’t. But we work with DevriX or we work with Human Made, may work with WebDevStudios and they do. It’s like indirectly by them hiring us and letting us build their sites and investing in not only their site but in us as an agency, we’re able to roll that forward into our five for the future efforts and our contribution efforts. I know of our agencies contribute to WordPress. I know that for a fact and we would not do that if we didn’t have an agency or did not have good clients that could allow us the time to do that. So I do think we should take that grain of salt. I’ve worked with a lot of enterprise companies that don’t contribute, but the agencies and companies that work with do.

Tom:
I think it’s something we could do quite a bit more around actually as a space, like you say, I think a lot of those companies don’t really realize that’s the case. We are probably not doing a good enough job of making that part of the pitch. I think it’s pretty common these days more and more common for this open source contribution stuff to fit quite nicely into goals or other initiatives that are happening in the enterprise. Again, there are dots that are probably not being connected. Even some kind of five for the Future Rep program that could extend to enterprise users of WordPress I think would be pretty interesting to think about.

Brad:
Yeah, the great way to look at it too is if your team, your developers are contributing. It’s not just putting things on the void and your corporation organization gets nothing out of it, right? Yes, they’re contributing to WordPress, which of course you’re going to directly benefit from, but you’re also leveling up your developers. They’re a hundred percent getting better at WordPress and understanding how WordPress works and getting into the core software and understanding how to read the code and how to work with Track and how to interact with the community. So your developers are going to level up, which means you’re going to get more out of them. The value is going to increase out of the salary versus benefits that you’re getting from them and work that you’re getting. So there are just a lot of advantages to it. But I think organizations, it’s a bit of a mindset shift.

They need to be working on our stuff. Why are they working over there? Well, they are working on your stuff by working over there and you can also prioritize initiatives within contributing that are important to your organization. It’s still contributing. It’s still helping. Even if you’re saying, I really want you to contribute to this thing, we kind of need it. It still helps everybody. So I don’t think that’s a bad thing. If you want to contribute one thing, if you’re looking for an easy ticket, get featured images automatically added into RSS feeds, that’s still out there. But if that’s important to your organization, your team could do that and it could probably get in the next release of WordPress. So that’s probably, like you say, there’s an educational component to it too of they just look at it as time they’re not spending on the business, but they actually kind of are. So that’s something we’re working on we’ll continue to work on because we love contributing to WordPress all of us. So it’s just working with these organizations and helping them understand how they can do it and how that benefits them.

Tom:
Something that jumped out to me in the survey that I’ll just mention at the end was the demographic of the respondents. I think something like 40, maybe slightly higher percent were leadership positions, which again, we’ve not been doing this survey before, but I would think that reflects a change compared to five, six years ago when actually WordPress was usually coming in bottom up. It wasn’t leadership led as I think that’s the stat I’ll be keeping an eye on over the surveys as we run them year on year. I think that for me tracks one of the major threads of enterprise WordPress as evolution. How do we go from bottom-up champion to leadership led?

Brad:
Yeah, that’s actually a great point. You’re not wrong. It used to stubble up from it, the tech people that worked with it and kind of liked it and they were like, Hey, we should look at this. Or maybe even marketing had an angle on it too because they were familiar with it from a marketing angle. But yeah, seeing it from the top down, that is a bit of a shift and that’s a good shift. And then of course just around this one is very encouraging too, and we’ll wrap up the survey here, but around the block editor, right, we’re always talking about what is the adoption, who’s using the block editor? Are they on the old classic WYSIWYG editor? And by and large, it seems like they are adopting it. There’s only about 19% that said they’re still on classic. And I think I was thinking about this.
I’m like, I’m sure this is largely impacted by the fact that corporations and enterprise have budgets. They have money they can invest to say we need to upgrade. This is the new thing, we got to get on it. Whereas smaller and medium businesses, if they just rebuilt their site a couple of years ago, they’re not going to reinvest to do it just to get blocks right now, if you’re a media site, you should because the value you’re bringing to your editors is going to be worth it. But a lot of sites, it’s just not there. So I would imagine that’s part of it. But just to see the adoption with the block editor being so high, and to be fair, about 27% is both so kind of a mixed bag, but at least they are using some blocks and then 54%, so over half is they’re all in on the block editor in Gutenberg. So that’s nice to see.

Tom:
Yeah, it’d be interesting to compare that to the broader, I dunno how that compares to broader usage of block editor, but I did that. I think that also connects back to the previous point where actually a lot of us who are doing enterprise work, were involved in the block editor because we are part of the project. And so we were able to bring that experience very early to our clients. A lot of us were launching Production Enterprise on the plugin before it was even merged into core. Whereas a lot of the broader web ecosystem, that transition has been more difficult. The ramp ups were more difficult learning a whole new thing, whereas I think of enterprise agencies didn’t face that so much. We were involved already.

Brad:
Yeah, a hundred percent. It’s such a game changer for organizations, especially media organizations. Once they see it, there’s that light bulb moment. Oh yeah, we definitely want that.

Tom:
Yeah, demo’s amazing.

Brad:
Cool. Well, we’re kind of coming up on time, so I want to briefly just touch on upcoming events. I know we have WordCamp US coming up, so if you’re anywhere you want to come, it’s in Portland, Oregon and it’s coming up on September 17th, 20th. I will be there. Are either one of you going to be able to make WordCamp US this year?

Tom:
I will also be there. Yeah, looking forward to that.

Brad

:
Yeah, Tom will be there. Mario, you got to make it over.

Mario:
It’s close to school year, so unfortunately I’ll be here.

Brad:
Yeah, I know. Yeah, timing gets tough. The timing of WordCamp US is always a little bit tough with school. I think last year was the week right before school started for me. I know it’s different everywhere, but you got to kind of juggle that with the family, right? So it’ll be a really fun event. So Tom and I will be there, a number of members of the Scale Consortium with the group of agencies that are working with the enterprise. So if you’re there, track us down. Love to talk, WordPress Talk, enterprise, all that good stuff. I want to give you both a chance to promote where people can find you online if they want to reach out and talk to you, blog, your website, company, Twitter, X, whatever. So Tom, where can people track you down?

Tom:
Probably Twitter is the best, just my name @Tom Willmot. You should check out scaleconsortium.org if you’re interested in what we’re doing over there. And this general initiative to come together as an enterprise WordPress space and grow the pie for us all and humanmade.com.

Brad:
Awesome. Hey Mario, where can everyone find you?

Mario:
Yeah, LinkedIn and Twitter are going to be the two best places. Look up Mario Peshev and more than happy to chat. If you need any WordPress or B2B growth solutions, DevriX.com is the place to go. And if you have any questions about enterprise, I’m pretty sure that all of us are going to be more than happy to help out. We are not just spending a hundred percent of our time on just sales pitches and closing business. We definitely want to make WordPress for the enterprise a better place and educating a lot for free writing books, giving sessions and podcasts and lots of different events. So it’s a completely different culture than what you’re probably used to IT webinars and sales pitches and BDR calls as well.

Brad:
WordPress is a fun side of enterprise.

Mario:
Yes,

Brad:
Definitely less stuffy over here. Come on in. The water’s fine, right?

I also love the fact you both called it Twitter. I’m still in the Twitter camp, so I’m on Twitter still somehow. Williamsba and over at webdevstudios.com if you want to check out our professional side of things. But this has really been a lot of fun. I’m really excited about the show. I want to bring on a lot of different guests and get different experiences. I want to bring on not just agencies, I want to bring on site administrators, site owners, I want to bring on marketing. I want to bring on people that are using WordPress in the enterprise and really hear about their experiences. Good, bad, otherwise, right? But get a lot of people from Scale Consortium on here as well because they’re all working within the enterprise. So it’s going to be a lot of fun. So if you’re interested in coming on the show, please reach out to myself or Bob WP, you can hit us up. And we’re in most of the WordPress Slacks post status, so love to have you on and looking forward to some future episodes on WordPress and the enterprise, the inside view. So I appreciate it, Tom. Mario, thanks for joining and we’ll see everyone next time.

Mario:
Great chat everyone. See you

Tom:
See you next time.