WordPress Brand Tone and Voice Survey Results Are In: “It’s Not a Unified Brand”

This survey has given us valuable insight into users’ perspectives. Participants shared over 300 unique open-text responses, offering plenty of original feedback.

A total of 46 countries were represented in the survey, with the largest group of respondents – about 28% – based in the United States.

Quick note on the latest rumblings in the community: The timing of the survey seems to have prompted some respondents to voice frustrations about recent events. I will aim to keep respondents’ personal reflections on the “Mullenweg vs WP Engine” battle out of this report and focus on the relevant insights about the WordPress brand. However, the way “WordPress” has been communicating via the News blog and social media channels has sparked concerns that came through in the feedback. It would be misleading not to include those answers in this report.

In the analysis below, I’ll be highlighting what we learned about how users perceive the WordPress brand’s voice and tone, as well as how that brand identity manifests in different parts of the WordPress dashboard. I’ve also included feedback from members of the WordPress community who reviewed the report and shared their comments on the results.

Let’s get started:

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:

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.

(For readability, I’ve rounded numbers to one decimal place in this analysis. The exact figures can be seen in the screenshots above.)

2. Assessment and impact

Here are the longer, open-text comments:

“Friendly, Inclusive, Focused on Improvement, Attractive to seasoned developers, Welcoming to less experienced developers.”

“There’s so much going on with WP that it’s hard to engage with when you’re already overwhelmed just trying to run your site and get it seen. But the tone is already friendly and positive, so that’s good.”

“Depends. Different parts of WP have difference voices. Community is more inclusive, Core is more Clear, and so on. The Dashboard that highlights new releases is more Charming.”

The next three questions were meant to be single-choice, but in true human fashion I missed that while configuring the survey (thanks Johannes from Formbricks for pointing this out). Fortunately, only a few accidental multiple selections slipped in, so the data is still pretty solid.

🔎 Analysis

 💡 Main takeaway: WordPress needs to be more professional. 

We’ve received a wide range of responses (82) to the open-ended question about what the WordPress’ tone should be like. A word analysis revealed that the most frequently mentioned terms that are not currently included in the brand voice guidelines are “professional” (7 mentions), “welcoming” (5 mentions) and “technical” (3 mentions). They have replaced the default “respectful” (2 mentions), “empowering” (2 mentions) and “composed” (0 mentions).

The need for a professional brand voice is most likely a reaction to the recent happenings in the ecosystem. Here’s how one respondent puts it as they want the WordPress brand voice to be:

The “welcoming” part is likely related to a perceived high bar of technical expertise needed to start using WordPress.

As another respondent puts it, WordPress should be more “welcoming to non-techies.” Another one wants it to be “welcoming to less experienced developers.” Here’s a similar one that wishes it to be “friendly and easy to understand for non-technical people.” This is a signal that the brand does not sound as empowering as it wants to be and points to plausible steps needed to get there.

Respondents feel that the brand should be more “friendly,” “clear,” and “inclusive” than it currently is, with these qualities rightly ranking among the six most frequently mentioned attributes.

Here is a word cloud that highlights the most mentioned inputs typed in the open-text field pondering, “I wish the WordPress’ written tone were more..“

Combined, 47.5% of respondents believe that a voice and tone adjustment would positively impact their user experience. However, a big portion of users (28.1%) present themselves as neutral towards this issue, while 24.2% disagree that this would make an impact. The results indicate a significant divide among respondents, with one half saying that the tone and voice is important for their user experience and the other feeling untouched by it.

The responses to the two questions about whether the WordPress brand resonates with its audience (I find that WordPress’ written tone and voice is the right one for me / the large majority of its users) indicate that it is acceptable for many participants, but it does not inspire strong enthusiasm or support.

3. Admin content

In order to see the brand voice in action, we selected six content pieces from the WordPress admin panel that were prompted with both original and alternative copy. In addition to the original/default version, the survey presented variations that were friendlier, more inclusive, or more empowering than the original. A technical/formal option was also available.

Quick question before you scroll down:

Which do you think is the current actual text in that post?

Click the accordion to see the answer:

🔎 Analysis

 💡 Main takeaway: Users expect a formal/technical tone of voice 

In five out of six questions here, respondents preferred alternative versions to the original texts. This was even more surprising as, to prevent any bias, the original/default text was not highlighted or marked in any way.

The findings reveal a preference for more formal/technical straightforward versions of the original text in the WordPress admin interface:

• “Begin writing your draft.” instead of “What’s on your mind?”
• “Logged in as [username]” instead of “Howdy, [username]”

“The page you are looking for does not exist, or it has been moved. Please try searching using the form below.” – in this case, the current text also won the popularity vote.

In two of the examples, the more inclusive community-centered language also won over the current one:

• “Thanks for being part of WordPress.” instead of “Thank you for creating with WordPress.”
• “Created for everyone with WordPress.” instead of “Designed with WordPress.”

Overall, users prefer clarity over friendliness in essential UI elements. On a separate but important note, a number of voices pointed to the need for a better user interface, adjusted for non-techies.

4. “About me”

We’ve asked respondents about their level of WordPress experience, their main profession and their language background.

🔎 Analysis

 💡 Main takeaway: Respondents are proficient WordPress developers, mostly native English speakers. 

The vast majority of respondents are proficient WordPress users (75.5%). 20.9% are intermediate and only a small percentage come off as beginners (3.5%).

Most respondents are developers or designers (34.9%) and bloggers (22.7%), with 15.3% identifying as technical experts (such as coders, core contributors, or plugin authors) and 12.2% as business owners.

The majority of respondents (53.4%) are English native speakers with 41% speaking American English. 40% speak English as a second language. Only five people are using a translated version of WordPress.

5. Open comments (last question)

We’ve received a total of 27 relevant answers to this final question. These are likely from engaged members of the WordPress community who have a significant interest in the evolution of the WordPress brand. Here’s what they had to say:

😡 Comments related to the Mullenweg vs WP Engine controversy:

“My answers would have been quite different a month ago.”

“The confusion between open source and commercial is becoming glaringly negative lately. Not a good move by Matt Mullenweg and Automattic. Clarity in branding would help, I think quite a lot.”

“The tone of the brand voice is altered dramatically by what the brand is used to do. The brand has been turned into a cudgel for Matt to attack those he disagrees with.”

“Stop being shitty and foster the WordPress developer community. The Contributors are what make WordPress good.”

“The News widget needs to be removed from Matt’s control and given to the community. His hostile messages have no place in the UI at all.”

“No one likes any of this let’s be honest. People aren’t building websites to advertise for Automattic.” (response for to the “Designed with WordPress” tagline question)

WordPress current brand voice is “Just Matt being hostile to his competitors on official channels.”

👉 See the full survey questions and results here.

Final thoughts

The survey comes at uncertain times with the community facing important existential questions about WordPress and its direction. These results offer a fresh perspective along with alternatives to the way in which the brand is defined, like professional, welcoming, formal or technical. Once things settle, these insights can help inspire the way the WordPress brand communicates in the near future.

An aspect that is worth mentioning is the respondents’ confusion towards what they mean when they think about WordPress. On several occasions, it becomes clear that people refer to different entities when discussing WordPress. An example comment:

I trust readers will view this report as a genuine effort to support WordPress brand’s growth and learn from its supporters.

Thanks for reading and participating! What are your thoughts on the results? Please leave a comment below!