Survey details
When designing the survey, I consulted the WordPress Brand Writing Style Guide created by the Marketing Contributor Team. The document was originally created in 2018 and updated in 2022.
According to it, the six attributes of WordPress’ brand voice are:
The WordPress brand tone, on the other hand, is characterized by two attributes:
Few open-source projects have tried to define their brand’s voice and tone like that.
While Mozilla does this beautifully (see the GIF below), Kubernetes keeps it more dry and lacks brand considerations in its brand guide.
The WordPress brand manual does not mention the WordPress CMS separately. Channel-specific guidelines are provided for the website, blog and social media channels, but there is no separate entry for the software itself.
Other iconic commercial brand guides from Canva, Zendesk or Mailchimp do not mention the product separately either.
Having no other indications, the WordPress dashboard would fall under the same brand attributes.
Six survey questions covered specific texts from the admin area. Each question included the current default text against original variations that adhere to the current brand voice attributes (friendly, empowering, clear, inclusive, composed, or charming).
The survey covered four main sections with single and multiple-choice questions:
- Current experience – which asked about the general experience with the brand’s voice and tone.
- Assessment and impact – which asked users how well the brand is tuned to its users and its overall impact.
- Admin content – which asked respondents to choose between four options for a given piece of written content in the WordPress dashboard.
- About me – which asked respondents for information about how they use WordPress and their language background.
- The final question invited users to share any additional comments they wished to include before finishing the survey.
The multiple-choice answers included five options:
- 1 – Strongly disagree
- 2 – Disagree
- 3 – Neutral
- 4 – Agree
- 5 – Strongly agree
Some questions also featured an ‘Other’ field to allow for open-text responses.
Respondents
We received 222 responses to the survey, with 80 people answering every question. While the survey had some limitations – such as a small sample size and potential respondent bias – we worked to gather input from a diverse group of users.
To reach a broad range of WordPress users, we promoted the survey across social platforms (X/Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit) and on WPShout. Several newsletters also featured the survey, including: BloggingPro, The Repository, wpMail , The WP Weekly, WP-Week and WPMU Dev. Big thanks to these friends for helping us spread the word!
On average, it took respondents 2 minutes and 20 seconds to complete the survey, with 36% answering all 16 questions. This is a strong engagement rate, especially for a survey of this length (10+ questions), which typically sees a completion rate of 20-30%. This suggests that participants were genuinely interested in the topic and felt a connection to the WordPress brand.
📆 The survey took place between September 30 and October 25, 2024.
Survey questions, results and analysis
Here are the main sections of the survey and the learnings from each.
1. Current experience with WordPress brand
First, here are all the individual questions in this section and the answers we got:
🔎 Analysis
💡 Main takeaway: The WordPress brand is friendly but unclear.
Respondents perceive WordPress as having a friendly voice, with 22.1% selecting “friendly” in the six multiple-options question. The next most popular attributes were “inclusive” and “empowering.” The least favored attribute was “charming,” which received only four votes in total.
The brand tone is perceived as equally “positive,” “neutral,” and “formal/technical,” with each option receiving 18-19% selections. The least selected option was “respectful,” with only 8.7%.
The majority of participants (46.5%) disagreed that WordPress speaks with a single, well-defined voice. Barely 22% agreed with this statement. 31.4% remained neutral or undecided.
Even though the questions about tone and voice included predefined, easy-to-click answers, most respondents chose to type in their own thoughts. Many of those responses criticized Matt Mullenweg in relation to the latest rumblings in the community. Some of those opinions were included in a separate section of this report (see below).
The interesting takeaway from the rest of the comments is that the WordPress brand is confusing (“unclear,” “mixed,” “chaotic,” “inconsistent,” “confusing,” “unclear,” “volatile,” “all over the place”). This sentiment becomes even more evident in the next section of the survey, where respondents were invited to assess the brand voice.
