Renaming WordPress.org Support to Documentation

Back on September 1st the main navigation of WordPress.org was updated and has already resulted in some excellent improvements in site metrics. In general, we’re seeing more pageviews compared to August, and we’ve seen significantly more visitors in sections like WPTV and News.

Given the relative success of these changes, I’d like to revisit a request that came up during the update. The current “Support” page, as titled within the page and the main nav, located at WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org//support/, actually shows documentation and does not provide any method for visitors to interact with humans (save for a small callout for the forums at the bottom). Even the search box offers to “Search documentation”. There have been a few requests from the Documentation team to change this:

Over the last few weeks, there has been some conversation about what we call our “resources” for site visitors and users of WordPress. While there appears to be some consensus around wanting a new landing page that highlights all of these resources, I believe that a few of us at WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. US were able to reach a more immediate solution.

An entire month has passed since our September nav revision, and we can see that the web traffic to Support remains largely unchanged at about 2.5 million pageviews per week. This is unsurprising given its menu placement prior to the change and the fact that the name remained unchanged.

Given that we now have a baseline for performance, I’d like to ask MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. to move ahead with re-titling the page and updating its nav item to “Documentation”. I can monitor the performance over the coming month for any abnormalities and report back. The hope is of course that this will have a neutral to positive impact, but we can discuss further in the case that it has any negative impact.

I have commented on  https://github.com/WordPress/wporg-mu-plugins/issues/262 accordingly.

Thank you to @milana_cap, @jpantani, and the contributors at the Marketing and Documentation tables at WCUS, and to the ticket authors above: @estelaris, @juanmaguitar, and @kenshino.

+make.wordpress.org/docs/
+make.wordpress.org/design/
+make.wordpress.org/marketing/

#navigation #support #documentation