Yes, this is yet another post about the infamous Gutenberg plugin. No, this post is a little different from all the other ones. Onward!

Gutenberg is the codename for a new content editor in WordPress, which is scheduled to be shipped with WordPress 5.0, sometimes before the end of 2018. It is planned to be enabled by default instead of the classic WordPress editor.

Gutenberg is an attempt to create a visual content editing experience similar to what WordPress competitors have: Wix, Squarespace and Weebly.

What does the WordPress community think of the Gutenberg plugin/editor?

At the moment of writing this there are 1,094 ratings (reviews) for the Gutenberg plugin on WordPress.org.

Gutenberg’s current rating sits at 2.3 out of 5 stars and continues to slowly go lower. Even the ridiculous Hello Dolly plugin has 2.6 out of 5 stars, so that’s saying something about the public opinion of Gutenberg.

Nonetheless I decided to dive a little deeper into Gutenberg’s ratings. Hopefully I can prove or disprove a couple of common theories and assumptions about the love and hate that Gutenberg gets.

Gutenberg Ratings Data Set

I created a small PHP crawler that automatically crawls all the rating pages of a plugin and then gathers some stats about the authors of all ratings. So now I can see who loves / hates a plugin the most.

At the time of analysis my crawler gathered the information from 1,095 Gutenberg ratings. Some of them have been removed since then or are not included in the official counters.

Gutenberg Ratings Breakdown:

Gutenberg Ratings as of 25/08/2018 Rating Count Share in % 627 57.2% 79 7.2% 60 5.4% 61 5.5% 268 24.4% Total: 1,095 Data from 25/08/2018 13:00 GMT.

Theory #1: New Users Hate/Love Gutenberg More/Less

Some people think that many of the 1-star ratings that Gutenberg gets are from experienced WordPress users. Others think that the 5-star ratings come from new users that don’t have sufficient experience with the classic editor.

Let’s look at the numbers.

Gutenberg Ratings by WordPress.org accounts registered in the last 30 days Rating Count Share in % 61 68.5% 6 6.7% 4 4.5% 5 5.6% 13 14.6% Total: 89 Data from 25/08/2018 13:00 GMT.

Conclusion #1: more newly registered WordPress.org user accounts (68% + 6.7% = 74.7%) are dissatisfied with Gutenberg than the average (57.2% + 7.2% = 64.4%) rating shows.

Gutenberg Ratings by WordPress.org accounts with only 1 published rating/review Rating Count Share in % 186 55.6% 27 8% 18 5.3% 20 5.9% 83 24.8% Total: 334 Data from 25/08/2018 13:00 GMT.

Conclusion #2: 63% of users that have never published any reviews/ratings on WordPress.org gave Gutenberg 1 or 2 stars, while 30.7% gave it a positive 4 or 5 stars rating.

Conclusion #3: 103 (31.3%) of the total number of 4 and 5 star ratings (329) of Gutenberg were published by accounts that have never reviewed anything else on WordPress.org besides Gutenberg.

Theory #2: Old WordPress.org Users(Accounts) Hate/Love Gutenberg More/Less

The average age (in months) of WordPress.org accounts by Gutenberg Rating Rating Age 52.9 55.1 39.6 48 53.4 Average user account age (in months): 52.2 Data from 25/08/2018 13:00 GMT.

Conclusion #4: more older WordPress.org user accounts (4.8% + 24.8% = 29.6%) are happy about Gutenberg than newly registered accounts (5.6% + 14.6% = 20.2%).

Conclusion #5: currently there is no tangible difference in the age of WordPress.org user accounts that love or hate Gutenberg.

Conclusion #6: the newest WordPress.org user accounts consider that Gutenberg is average, hence it deserves only 3 stars.

Conclusion #7: the oldest WordPress.org user accounts dislike Gutenberg but have some hope that it will improve, hence they award it 2 stars.

Gutenberg Ratings by WordPress.org accounts older than 5 years Rating Count Share in % 255 58.7% 33 7.6% 17 3.9% 21 4.8% 108 24.8% Total: 434 Data from 25/08/2018 13:00 GMT.

Gutenberg Ratings by WordPress.org accounts older than 7 years Rating Count Share in % 157 58.5% 20 7.4% 8 3% 14 5.2% 69 25.7% Total: 268 Data from 25/08/2018 13:00 GMT.

Gutenberg Ratings by WordPress.org accounts older than 9 years Rating Count Share in % 67 58.2% 9 7.8% 2 1.7% 5 4.3% 32 27.8% Total: 115 Data from 25/08/2018 13:00 GMT.

Conclusion #8: no matter how old the WordPress.org user accounts are, the percentage of Gutenberg “haters” is more or less constant.

Conclusion #9: the percentage of Gutenberg “lovers” increases with the user’s account age.

If I were to speculate I would guess that the reason for this is that Automattic staff members, WordPress.org leadership, Gutenberg contributors and ambassadors usually have older accounts.

Theory #3: The Most Active WordPress.org Users Hate/Love Gutenberg More/Less

Here are some additional metrics that might be of interest to people.

Gutenberg Ratings by WordPress.org accounts with more than 10 published reviews Rating Count Share in % 107 55.4% 10 5.1% 11 5.6% 15 7.7% 50 25.9% Total: 193 Data from 25/08/2018 13:00 GMT.

Gutenberg Ratings by WordPress.org accounts with more than 10 forum topics Rating Count Share in % 165 58% 24 8.4% 12 4.2% 17 5.9% 66 23.2% Total: 284 Data from 25/08/2018 13:00 GMT.

Gutenberg Ratings by WordPress.org accounts with more than 50 forum replies Rating Count Share in % 89 52% 14 8.1% 4 2.3% 11 6.4% 53 30.9% Total: 171 Data from 25/08/2018 13:00 GMT.

Other Findings

User accounts with the User Role of Keymaster have left 3 Gutenberg reviews: one 4-star review and two 5-star reviews.

have left 3 Gutenberg reviews: one 4-star review and two 5-star reviews. User accounts with the User Role of Moderator have left 1 Gutenberg review: 1 star.

have left 1 Gutenberg review: 1 star. Banned user accounts have left 5 Gutenberg reviews: four 1-star reviews and one 5-star review.

In Conclusion

My personal conclusion is that Gutenberg is generally disliked by all categories of WordPress.org users, no matter how long they have been active in the community. However newly registered .org user accounts seem to dislike it even more.

I would guess that there are casual WordPress users that haven’t been actively watching what’s happening in WordPress, so the Gutenberg prompt in 4.9.8 pointed them towards this new “publishing experience”. And from the looks of it these users are not impressed, so they feel that they have to voice their opinions.

Taking all these numbers in consideration it is curious to see how the Gods of WordPress continue to force Gutenberg on all of us, claiming that it is actually great for casual users, and that only stubborn theme developers complain about it.

Do you have any thoughts? Feel free to comment below. I will not delete comments the way .org moderators have been deleting negative Gutenberg reviews.