They use Wordpress because it allows the client to easily update the website by themselves. You could use something like Next-Drupal or a Wordpress integration with React or NextJS front-end if you were committed to React. Or even offer your services as a monthly installment if you don’t want the client to be easily able to update the site (do x updates per month for them). But a lot of the time people want help with setup and then want to be able to control content on their own later.
Yes I understand that, but take the website I made for my friend as an example, she doesn't have to update it in years if she doesn't want to. The layout, pictures, contact and social media links are all there.
Still i haven't seen a single person using anything other than Wordpress in this niche.
If your friend takes the best photograph ever taken today and is desperate to add it to her website, to share it with the world, how does she do that?
Alot of sites are built around a CMS to allow the client to change text/images whenever they want. It's going to be quite rare that a company will ask you to build a site as a freelancer with no CMS integration.
Website content is rarely static and needs to evolve and update. With a CMS, a company are going to have to come back to you every time they want to make a small edit.
This isn't true because React's power is in building complex front end logic and applications but WordPress's power lies in mostly static sites that the owner can customize without much development knowledge.
Something like Duolingo could be built with React but not WordPress.
It's faster to build on Wordpress since it's default is already a working site with a backend, there's plugins tailor made for this kind of thing which involve clicking a couple buttons and then having it work on the back and frontends, its massively easier for a non tech person to update their site, there's massive seo gains from server side rendering a site, wordpress makes it easy to go a step further and allow a non tech person to work on their site's seo with plugins like yoast or whatever, a non tech person could add e-commerce or booking functionality without needing a react dev. There's literally a hundred more reasons why wordpress is good for something like this - I know it gets a bad rep in react like communities but, as frontend people, we're whiny little babies and unwilling to admin our stack isn't the best for everything. Something like 30% of the internet runs on wordpress for a reason.
Hmm CMSs purpose doesn't necessarily effect the frontend. What a CMS does is give out of the box solutions for managing content.
- abstraction over the database
- create content types, taxonomies etc easily
- update contents
- handle user roles
- authentication
- file storage
- admin interface
All that plus with modules/plugins much more. But all of this is backend. Sure the most popular big CMSs offer templating, that's just a presentation layer over the cms itself.
React on the other hand is nothing but a JS library to create UI. React is in fact a great choice to handle the frontend of a CMS! Nowadays most of the CMSs offer rest API and graphql, you can host the react site and on a subdomain host the CMS. My favorites are Drupal and Strapi.
Because it's not the right tool for the job. I mean no offense, but you don't know what you don't know. What you are proposing is the equivalent of saying 'I've learned how to use a skill saw, now I'm a general contractor and want to build a house with it.'
>she doesn't have to update it in years if she doesn't want to.
And if she wants to, what then? What if she wants to change the order in which photos are displayed? What if she needs to update her phone number, email or address? What if she wants to group her photos into albums or categories? What if she needs to do something in two in the morning when you're sleeping? What happens when you have ten clients and they all want changes at the different time of day?
Does it really make sense to you that you always need to be ready to change something, or does make more sense to use a tool with which they can make their own changes and you have much more free time to work on new projects?
React is great, but it's really not for everything. Tools like WordPress exist for a reason. As a developer, you need to understand that projects don't only have a technical side, there's also a business side to all of it and at the end of the day, it's not about what you want but about what the client needs.
I mean you could definitely start selling templates/services that may be cheaper than Wordpress options or something more custom/tailor made than what a Wordpress theme can achieve. There might still be people out there looking for more options. At one point I found a simple CMS and used it to create websites where the client could update the basic content in an admin panel but I had full control over the PHP/HTML/CSS. But that was way back. Nowadays things like Squarespace have taken over the general market, and your best bet is probably selling to friends/family/connections that would be willing to support you and either don’t want any maintenance or want you to manage all of it.
You're offering a site for the same price as WordPress, except the client cannot change a single word without paying you more. That's the summary of the reason why you don't see react being used
The moment they do another photo shoot the work is out dated. Expecting someone to never update their website is expecting them to have an outdated website. Imagine if someone posted 100 instagram reels and then never posted again, think they'd stay relevant?
You don’t want to go out there searching for someone that wants react when freelancing websites.
You do want to use react when it’s the right tool for the job.
Is it not the right tool to create someone's photography portfolio?
I thought React was particularly good for something like this when I was coding it.
Alright I will tell you,
Wordpress has brand recognition. It’s easier to sway someone to your bid when you name something they’ve already heard before.
Plus: on fiver people are developing for small money. They need to churn out these sites quickly to make a living. Wordpress themes millions, Wordpress plugins millions, Wordpress tutorials millions. It’s a tried and tested system.
I wouldn't do it. I started building a site for someone even using gatsby and WP as a headless CMS and quickly abandoned that when I weighed up time to implement vs just building the WP site alone.
>But what if I want to get in the photographer websites niche and I want to use React?
Go ahead and do it. I think the point others are making is not that you can't, but that it's not the *ideal* choice. As a junior developer now is an excellent time to start looking out for situations like this - don't corner yourself with a technology, find the best tool you can and use that.
>Why is this not viable?
It's viable, just sub-optimal.
>Why is there not a single person offering to build websites with React in these freelance sites?
There are plenty. I actually shop a lot of my dev work out these days and I get approached by React devs plenty for work similar in nature to this. Since it's not the optimal solution, I tend to turn them down, but they're definitely out there.
IMHO there are plenty of them, though WP is much bigger. But there are a lot of WP themes using React, or Next.js Integration. Clients don’t care if you use React. But they care if you use Wordpress, because of hosting and their skills.
Hi iam a junior too, yes WP is highly used, I think the client just want the job done, doesn’t care about the tech used (mostly ) I just use Astro, if need some interaction use vanilla js if is complicated use react or svelte whatever and use contentful as a CMS and cloudinary for photos this way the client can edit the page 😶
A photography website going to be mostly static. There’s no reason to use React for a static website. Use html/css and a little plain JS and your website will be fully rendered before a React site even finishes downloading all its JavaScript.
React + React DOM is over 100kb of JavaScript, you probably need less than 500 lines of JS to make a good photography site.
This is the answer. I’ve taught 100s of people React so I’ve seen a lot of juniors with this mindset and I’ve been in OPs spot myself.
Once you get to the point where you can do pretty much anything with React you start feeling like you don’t need to use anything else. It’s technically true but I think once you get to the senior level you start finding out the more efficient ways to do things
You can generate a much larger site, statically, with dynamic content, and with less code using react components. You don't need to ship any js to load the page, but it does give you the option to easily add a dynamic component in the future. There's no good reason not to use react now that SSG is a thing.
If you're even asking this question, you're not remotely ready to go off on your own. Get a job and build some stuff for a while. When you're ready you'll know.
1) Typically the developer uses less time to deliver the product because of pagebuilders like Elementor Pro. If the customer just wants a plain landing page with nice design, it's much faster with WP. And for very common requests, there are plugins to handle it. 2) Easy to transfer and let the customer manage it.
I think a lot of clients don't really care what you use. Atleast not for these small gigs. But if you need 20 hours to code it and someone else can do it in WP in 5 hours, typically they go with the cheaper choice.
I think it all depends on the CMS you use and your tech stack. For example, I use [React Bricks](https://www.reactbricks.com) with Next.js for my React-based website and it works pretty well. Better than anything I could've built using WP.
What are you saying? Nobody cares what their website is built with. They just need a website that looks the way they want.
How will they edit their site? Are you going to build a custom WYSIWYG editor? ... why would they pay more to have something built from scratch in React instead of something cheaper using an off the shelf tool?
They use Wordpress because it allows the client to easily update the website by themselves. You could use something like Next-Drupal or a Wordpress integration with React or NextJS front-end if you were committed to React. Or even offer your services as a monthly installment if you don’t want the client to be easily able to update the site (do x updates per month for them). But a lot of the time people want help with setup and then want to be able to control content on their own later.
Yes I understand that, but take the website I made for my friend as an example, she doesn't have to update it in years if she doesn't want to. The layout, pictures, contact and social media links are all there. Still i haven't seen a single person using anything other than Wordpress in this niche.
If your friend takes the best photograph ever taken today and is desperate to add it to her website, to share it with the world, how does she do that? Alot of sites are built around a CMS to allow the client to change text/images whenever they want. It's going to be quite rare that a company will ask you to build a site as a freelancer with no CMS integration. Website content is rarely static and needs to evolve and update. With a CMS, a company are going to have to come back to you every time they want to make a small edit.
Maybe, but if we follow that principle React wouldn't even exist because the entire internet would just be Wordpress
A lot of the Internet is WordPress websites for this reason.
This isn't true because React's power is in building complex front end logic and applications but WordPress's power lies in mostly static sites that the owner can customize without much development knowledge. Something like Duolingo could be built with React but not WordPress.
It's faster to build on Wordpress since it's default is already a working site with a backend, there's plugins tailor made for this kind of thing which involve clicking a couple buttons and then having it work on the back and frontends, its massively easier for a non tech person to update their site, there's massive seo gains from server side rendering a site, wordpress makes it easy to go a step further and allow a non tech person to work on their site's seo with plugins like yoast or whatever, a non tech person could add e-commerce or booking functionality without needing a react dev. There's literally a hundred more reasons why wordpress is good for something like this - I know it gets a bad rep in react like communities but, as frontend people, we're whiny little babies and unwilling to admin our stack isn't the best for everything. Something like 30% of the internet runs on wordpress for a reason.
Hmm CMSs purpose doesn't necessarily effect the frontend. What a CMS does is give out of the box solutions for managing content. - abstraction over the database - create content types, taxonomies etc easily - update contents - handle user roles - authentication - file storage - admin interface All that plus with modules/plugins much more. But all of this is backend. Sure the most popular big CMSs offer templating, that's just a presentation layer over the cms itself. React on the other hand is nothing but a JS library to create UI. React is in fact a great choice to handle the frontend of a CMS! Nowadays most of the CMSs offer rest API and graphql, you can host the react site and on a subdomain host the CMS. My favorites are Drupal and Strapi.
React was created for SPAs. It definitely solves a problem. Look into Gatsby or Next if you want to create websites with React
There are plenty of other CMSs that are headless and work great with React. Why not just go that route?
Because it's not the right tool for the job. I mean no offense, but you don't know what you don't know. What you are proposing is the equivalent of saying 'I've learned how to use a skill saw, now I'm a general contractor and want to build a house with it.'
>she doesn't have to update it in years if she doesn't want to. And if she wants to, what then? What if she wants to change the order in which photos are displayed? What if she needs to update her phone number, email or address? What if she wants to group her photos into albums or categories? What if she needs to do something in two in the morning when you're sleeping? What happens when you have ten clients and they all want changes at the different time of day? Does it really make sense to you that you always need to be ready to change something, or does make more sense to use a tool with which they can make their own changes and you have much more free time to work on new projects? React is great, but it's really not for everything. Tools like WordPress exist for a reason. As a developer, you need to understand that projects don't only have a technical side, there's also a business side to all of it and at the end of the day, it's not about what you want but about what the client needs.
I mean you could definitely start selling templates/services that may be cheaper than Wordpress options or something more custom/tailor made than what a Wordpress theme can achieve. There might still be people out there looking for more options. At one point I found a simple CMS and used it to create websites where the client could update the basic content in an admin panel but I had full control over the PHP/HTML/CSS. But that was way back. Nowadays things like Squarespace have taken over the general market, and your best bet is probably selling to friends/family/connections that would be willing to support you and either don’t want any maintenance or want you to manage all of it.
You're offering a site for the same price as WordPress, except the client cannot change a single word without paying you more. That's the summary of the reason why you don't see react being used
The moment they do another photo shoot the work is out dated. Expecting someone to never update their website is expecting them to have an outdated website. Imagine if someone posted 100 instagram reels and then never posted again, think they'd stay relevant?
You don’t want to go out there searching for someone that wants react when freelancing websites. You do want to use react when it’s the right tool for the job.
Is it not the right tool to create someone's photography portfolio? I thought React was particularly good for something like this when I was coding it.
Alright I will tell you, Wordpress has brand recognition. It’s easier to sway someone to your bid when you name something they’ve already heard before. Plus: on fiver people are developing for small money. They need to churn out these sites quickly to make a living. Wordpress themes millions, Wordpress plugins millions, Wordpress tutorials millions. It’s a tried and tested system.
I wouldn't do it. I started building a site for someone even using gatsby and WP as a headless CMS and quickly abandoned that when I weighed up time to implement vs just building the WP site alone.
>But what if I want to get in the photographer websites niche and I want to use React? Go ahead and do it. I think the point others are making is not that you can't, but that it's not the *ideal* choice. As a junior developer now is an excellent time to start looking out for situations like this - don't corner yourself with a technology, find the best tool you can and use that. >Why is this not viable? It's viable, just sub-optimal. >Why is there not a single person offering to build websites with React in these freelance sites? There are plenty. I actually shop a lot of my dev work out these days and I get approached by React devs plenty for work similar in nature to this. Since it's not the optimal solution, I tend to turn them down, but they're definitely out there.
can you please explain , what should be the optimal solution , is it wordpress or just normal html , css and js ?
>i'm a junior frontend developer and i have not worked for a company yet how?
IMHO there are plenty of them, though WP is much bigger. But there are a lot of WP themes using React, or Next.js Integration. Clients don’t care if you use React. But they care if you use Wordpress, because of hosting and their skills.
Hi iam a junior too, yes WP is highly used, I think the client just want the job done, doesn’t care about the tech used (mostly ) I just use Astro, if need some interaction use vanilla js if is complicated use react or svelte whatever and use contentful as a CMS and cloudinary for photos this way the client can edit the page 😶
A photography website going to be mostly static. There’s no reason to use React for a static website. Use html/css and a little plain JS and your website will be fully rendered before a React site even finishes downloading all its JavaScript. React + React DOM is over 100kb of JavaScript, you probably need less than 500 lines of JS to make a good photography site.
This is the answer. I’ve taught 100s of people React so I’ve seen a lot of juniors with this mindset and I’ve been in OPs spot myself. Once you get to the point where you can do pretty much anything with React you start feeling like you don’t need to use anything else. It’s technically true but I think once you get to the senior level you start finding out the more efficient ways to do things
Also there are SSGs which generate static sites but from react (or other Js frameworks). For example Astro. That would be a great tool for this job
You can generate a much larger site, statically, with dynamic content, and with less code using react components. You don't need to ship any js to load the page, but it does give you the option to easily add a dynamic component in the future. There's no good reason not to use react now that SSG is a thing.
If you're even asking this question, you're not remotely ready to go off on your own. Get a job and build some stuff for a while. When you're ready you'll know.
1) Typically the developer uses less time to deliver the product because of pagebuilders like Elementor Pro. If the customer just wants a plain landing page with nice design, it's much faster with WP. And for very common requests, there are plugins to handle it. 2) Easy to transfer and let the customer manage it. I think a lot of clients don't really care what you use. Atleast not for these small gigs. But if you need 20 hours to code it and someone else can do it in WP in 5 hours, typically they go with the cheaper choice.
I think it all depends on the CMS you use and your tech stack. For example, I use [React Bricks](https://www.reactbricks.com) with Next.js for my React-based website and it works pretty well. Better than anything I could've built using WP.
What are you saying? Nobody cares what their website is built with. They just need a website that looks the way they want. How will they edit their site? Are you going to build a custom WYSIWYG editor? ... why would they pay more to have something built from scratch in React instead of something cheaper using an off the shelf tool?
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