 Well, hello everybody and welcome to my talk. Thank you for coming Yeah, there it is today, I'm going to talk about tomorrow's generations perspective on WordPress My name is Tico the Valk. I am 16 years old and I still attend high school. I Worked at Yoast for three years as a support engineer and Besides that this year. I started my own web development agency But let's let's dive a little deeper into my childhood. I Like to say that I grew up in WordPress as I'm a WordPress kid My parents are Joester Falk and Marika von der Racht who owned the company Yoast until about two years ago So all my vacations existed of me going to the Google offices and me Having to walk around in Legoland with my yo shirt on You could say that I was tortured with WordPress. I Once wanted to try out a different CMS and my parents found out about it. I Didn't get any food for the rest of the week That's a joke. I love my parents But one what I want to say is even though I grew up with WordPress There are still some things that I don't like or that I think can be done better so What do people my age think of WordPress? To support this I've done a small survey amongst my peers and people in my social circle Which I'll get back to during this presentation in this presentation I'll talk about three reasons why WordPress feels appeal to young people Firstly being it WordPress is not focused WordPress marketing is not focused on young people and Secondly WordPress is hard to get started with Thirdly WordPress does not look appealing or as appealing as its competitors so as I just mentioned I did a small survey amongst people my age and I asked them to check the books boxes of the logos that they recognize two of these logos where WordPress and Shopify and Yeah Almost 60% of the people I surveyed were they recognized WordPress Which I think was quite a lot. This does not mean that they know what it is They just recognize logo But now the thing that I found weird is This exact same amount of people recognized Shopify Which is weird, right because we're much bigger. So they should recognize us more So why is that? Well, as we're aware young people don't use the same social media as all people do WordPress social media networks mainly on Twitter newsletters Facebook I guess I don't know. I don't have Facebook While young people use YouTube tiktok snapchat Instagram and we know that influences are really important a Study done by HubSpot shows that one in three Gen Z years has bought something Recommended to them by an influencer in the past three months So coming back to that question why did the same amount of people recognize? Shopify as they did WordPress It's because Shopify does market young people This is a screenshot from a video from mr. Beast. If you don't know who he is I hate to break to you. You're old This is one of the biggest YouTubers in the world at the moment. He has over a hundred fifty five million subscribers and Almost 40 billion views across all of his channels This guy's big In this particular video he traveled to Antarctica where he Went in the middle of nowhere. He started to climb a mountain for six hours He got to the top and he named it Shopify Which I think is an insane marketing stunt because this mountain is now actually called Shopify So I think we a WordPress should should do something like this as well Moving on to my second point WordPress is hard to get started with. I Had to say this is what you see when you start a WordPress site Welcome to WordPress. Thanks. I can learn more about the newest version. Why would I want to do that? My site health status. Is it sick already? What happened? I can create a quick draft. Why would I want to do that and I can attend an event. Yeah, I'd never do that So it's not clear what to do it's chaotic While our competitors, they do have a clear startup path If we take a look at Shopify, for example You don't this is not even the first thing that you see this screenshot You first see you first get some questions about the kind of site to run and based on that you get this setup guide Shopify will help you set up your site They'll help you add your first product to help you customize your online store. They'll help you personalize your own store The same goes for wix they do the same thing You get some steps and it will help you customize your store If I wasn't forced to work with WordPress I would have quit right here because Well, yeah It's not clear how to get started. You'd rather have something like Shopify wix And this correlates with my third point WordPress is not that flashy. It doesn't look as appealing as a competitors. It's older, you could say So as I mentioned before I did a small survey amongst my peers and I also showed them three Screenshots of different interfaces one of Shopify one of wix and one of WordPress and As I expected 75 percent of people liked the wix or Shopify interface better than WordPress But how could we fix this right? Because we want to And we should well Recently newcomers released who express which I think is a great solution for this it Looks cleaner. It looks it's a not it's a lot nicer to work with I feel like and It helps you set up your site so it solves the setup guide issue as well But that's only for newcomers, right? So how we solve this for the entirety of WordPress Extendify is a good solution for that Extendify helps Users on board their WordPress site extend if I sells to hosts. I think they're here at the conference right now So go ahead and talk to them But they make it easier to get started with your WordPress site, which is something We should look into So now what I've mentioned a couple of solutions already But let's let's get them straight once again. We should start with Social media that is focused on young people Social media like tiktok face. No, not Facebook tiktok snapchat Instagram and YouTube and we should collaborate with influencers To promote the WordPress brand Then we should make WordPress easier to work with with solutions like Who Express and extendify which will make it more appealing to a young audience? but We can make it more appealing, but we also have to get the brand known because apparently same amount of people know Shopify, so We should fix that as well and To do that. We shouldn't keep promoting our own brands We should all collaborate and promote WordPress together a good example of this was a couple weeks ago When WordPress and 20 years old. Yeah, I know big four years old and me and We all the big brands celebrated WordPress they didn't celebrate themselves. They celebrate WordPress and This is one of the big advantages that Shopify and Wix have over us. They are one brand They are one company. They make all the money, which means they can spend Whatever they want on advertising. Well, we we can't do that so we have to collaborate and Do the marketing together Which means we all have to become the WordPress marketing team and we might end up with a mountain got WordPress as well