2023 Annual Survey Results and Next Steps

Each year, WordPress seeks to collect high-level data about trends and themes across the vast ecosystem of users, site builders, extenders, and contributors to help inform decision-making and provide valuable feedback on the project’s status. 

For 2023, the survey process was updated to enhance accessibility, usability, analysis, and multilingual support. Additionally, a few questions were replaced or updated to ensure the survey captures relevant data on current and future WordPress topics.

The data collected is used as one of many signals that inform the project’s road map and areas of focus, both near and long-term.

Highlights from 2023

Overall, awareness and/or use of block-based features is up year over year, as well as resources such as Learn.WordPress.org. This reflects project-wide efforts to increase utilization of these respectively. However, positive sentiment about WordPress is down modestly, and more so among contributors. The analysis of the annual survey highlights certain areas that could benefit from increased attention in 2024.

Here are the highlights split into three parts: logistics, general trends, and contributor sentiment.

Logistics

• Completions were up 17% in 2023, though short of a goal to double them, despite increased promotion and partnership with some hosting partners.
• The Polyglots team translated the survey from English into 9 different languages, the most ever for the survey.
• Debuted a new platform, Alchemer, for improved accessibility, usability, data collection, administration, and analysis. 
• The completion rate increased again from last year’s high of 63% to 79% in 2023, proving that investing some time in the new platform and clarifying wording was well worth it.

General trends

• NPS was 30.1 overall, with contributors at 27.9 and non-contributors at 32. The NPS has trended downward since 2021, when it was 45. 
• 60% of respondents indicate usage of Gutenberg, 8% are unsure, and 12% use something other than Gutenberg and/or the Classic Editor. This is up from 2022 (54%).
• 45% of respondents indicate that the WordPress Site Editor meets their site-building needs, 26% are indifferent, and 29% disagree.
• 61% of respondents indicate familiarity with block themes and plugins. While this question was not asked previously, in 2022, 53% said they had used blocks
  “In the new site editor.”
• Security, performance, and stability were the top three critical areas respondents considered when building their website, plugin, theme, or style variation.
• 63% agree that WordPress is as good or better than other CMSs, down from 68% in 2022
• Respondents indicated that the best things about WordPress are that it is open source, has ample plugin options, incorporates good customization, is easy to use, and offers flexibility. This is similar to 2022.
• Limitless configurations, performance, scalability, accessibility, integration, hosting, and support all saw 100% or more increases compared to 2022 regarding favorite things about WordPress.
• Respondents cited “too many plugins,” “the site editing experience,” “security,” and “performance” as the top four worst things about WordPress. Most interestingly, though, 16% indicated that none of the 20 topics were terrible, and there was a 43% decrease in the number of people indicating that “site editing is difficult to learn.”
• Search engines and YouTube continue to be the two most common resources for finding information about WordPress, while those writing about WordPress, in general, saw a sharp decline year over year.

Contributor sentiment

• 58% of self-identified contributors to WordPress said they agree with the project’s roadmap plans for “Phase 3” and “Phase 4” as a good plan to enhance the WordPress experience for developers, creators, and publishers alike.
• While about one-third of respondents indicated they contribute to the WordPress project, only about half knew how to get involved, knew about WordCamps and meetups, understood the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com, and knew the benefits of open source. 
• Of 22 topics, the distribution of the top three things that WordPress needs to focus on from the perspective of contributors was broad, with only a 13.5% raw percentage point (1350 basis points) difference between performance (18.6%) in first position and collaborative editing (5.1%) in 22nd position. This shows a need for more consensus among contributors regarding where to focus resources and/or illustrates that the project has many essential elements with passionate supporters.
• Fewer contributors had a positive experience in 2023 (55%) versus 2022 (64%).
• Similarly, the feeling of being welcome in the WordPress community among contributors decreased to 57% versus 64% in 2022.
• Furthermore, contributors feel appropriately recognized less in 2023 (46%) than in 2022 (51%).

Bringing it all together

The 2023 annual WordPress survey participation and results highlight the possibility of survey burnout within the WordPress community and some declining overall satisfaction among contributors. There is an opportunity to increase awareness regarding critical initiatives such as WordCamps and other resources for WordPress users and contributors alike and to increase messaging on improvements made within the project to the CMS.

What’s planned for 2024

In the next iteration of the survey, the plan is to improve the survey’s questions further to ensure they continue to provide valuable insight into the project’s trends. This means some questions will be replaced while others might be refined.

Additionally, plans are being explored to distribute and promote the survey at each of the three annual flagship WordCamps (Europe, U.S., and Asia). This would be in contrast to a single yearly survey. More exploration on this topic will take place in the months to come.

View the 2023 Slide Deck

View a web-based version of the results. Note that this link may expire in the future.

Thank you to @dansoschin for the analysis and editorial support. Thanks also to @angelasjin, @eidolonnight, and @cbringmann for their reviews and final edits.