Hello gkhan.dev! My WordPress – Tailwind Blog Experience

After about a year and a half, when I decided to start blogging again, I made the decision to revamp my existing site (blog.gkhan.me). I had set up the blog.gkhan.me site on a subdomain using WordPress. Just like now, I was short on time, so I started with a free theme.

While designing the blog, my focus was on simplicity, readability, and user-friendliness. This way, users can easily find what they’re looking for, spend more time on the site, leave happy, and have a higher likelihood of returning.

Why did I choose WordPress?

Of course, there were aspects that I considered as shortcomings. However, I needed to make a decision before addressing these shortcomings. When I started blogging, there were various alternatives outside of WordPress, such as Medium, dev.to, and Hashnode. You can start writing on these platforms, including Medium, within 5 to 10 minutes of signing up. Their interfaces are good, most have their own networks, meaning your articles are more likely to reach audiences, and you don’t have to pay any fees. So why did I overlook these advantages and choose to continue with my own WordPress theme?

1. Self-Improvement

From time to time, I take on freelance projects. As a frontend developer, I usually handle projects using React libraries like Next.js and Gatsby. In fact, using these tends to yield more effective results than WordPress. However, WordPress is more widely used and easier to understand. When I try to explain SSG or ISR methods to clients, they often get skeptical about why we’re setting up two projects instead of one.

When I decided to move forward with WordPress, ready-made themes didn’t meet my expectations. Therefore, it seemed more reasonable to relaunch with a theme I had developed myself.

I started the research process. After a while, I narrowed down the options to three: Underscore, Tailpress, and Sage.

For theme development, Sage was the best among them. Its documentation is quite good, it offers a lot of useful features for development, and it’s more active on the PHP side, which means the development process will be longer.

That left Underscore and Tailpress. They are very similar starter themes; you essentially build development on top of an almost empty theme. I chose Tailpress because it came with Tailwind CSS and used a compiler.

The development process was quite enjoyable. It was easier than I thought, but it also required more work than I expected. I was particularly pleased to have the opportunity to use AlpineJS, which I hadn’t had a chance to try before.

2. More Economical Professionalism

WordPress hosting packages are more economical compared to others (excluding static site hosts). It also comes with CPanel, which allows you to have email associated with your domain name. Especially in times when foreign currency is much more valuable against Turkish Lira, WordPress provides some relief for your wallet.

3. Customization

Using a blog platform or continuing with a ready-made theme wouldn’t allow me to reflect the features and design I wanted on my site. The main features I wanted to have on the new site were:

• Dark-Light theme switch
• Dracula theme for code
• Multiple language options
• Most read articles and their view counts
• Tagging and categorization for accessibility
• Dropdown menu based on categories
• Search on the same page
• Potential for future monetization through ads or affiliate marketing

Especially, I thought having multiple language options would contribute to both traffic and references.

4. Increasing Market Share

In 2023, 43% of internet sites, totaling 810 million websites, are built with WordPress. Despite the emergence of dozens of platforms every year, this percentage continues to grow. According to statistics found at https://colorlib.com/wp/wordpress-statistics, the market share and growth rate for the past 10 years are as follows:

• 2023: 43.1% (+0.3)
• 2022: 43.0% (+3.7)
• 2021: 39.5% (+4.1)
• 2020: 35.4% (+2.7)
• 2019: 32.7% (+3.5)
• 2018: 29.2% (+3.5)
• 2017: 27.3% (+1.9)
• 2016: 25.6% (+1.7)
• 2015: 23.3% (+2.3)
• 2014: 21.0% (+2.3)
• 2013: 17.4% (+3.6)

Of course, there is a downside to this situation; WordPress development fees are quite low. People without software knowledge are also involved. Honestly, this is why I’ve always kept my distance from WordPress. Let’s say you offer a 10x rate to a client. Someone with a merchant mindset who has a library of themes is offering x rates. Therefore, the market is very low and somewhat low-quality.

However, with the depreciation of the Turkish Lira, piecemeal work from abroad is now worth good money. So, a decade after entering the sector, I said, “Let me have a piece of the pie too!”

How could I have done it better?

As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, I could have written a more professional theme with Sage. Performance-wise, it would have been better to build the blog using the Next.js – WordPress Rest API duo with the ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration) method. To compensate for this gap, I will turn to Cache plugins.

Especially according to the articles I read about Cloudflare APO, it provides a performance increase between 3 to 8 times. As far as I understand, this plugin caches static copies of your pages in memory and distributes them to edge servers worldwide.

We can do something similar with the Simply Static plugin. With the Simply Static plugin, you can take the HTML output of your WordPress site and upload it to servers as a static site. However, in this case, you would lose site dynamics and take on additional workload. It can be used for portfolio-style sites that don’t have constant updates.

If I had taken it more seriously, I could have written the theme skeleton in React and integrated its static output into WordPress. This way, I would have had a more consistent theme and more customization options. Who knows, maybe in the coming days, I’ll write my gkhan.me site this way.