Why I stopped using WordPress

In 2019 I built a website for a company on WordPress.

It was fine at the time. Good-looking site. Happy client.

Two years later he called. The site was slow, he said, and it kept throwing errors.

So I went in and looked.

23 plugins.

23 plugins, written by 23 people who have never met each other.

Six of them hadn't been updated in years.

Two had published security holes.

And they had started fighting.

What WordPress actually is

Think of a PC somebody assembled from parts.

The base is off the shelf. Every time you want it to do one more thing, you bolt on a plugin.

Take payments? Bolt one on.

Take bookings? Bolt one on.

Make it faster? Bolt one on — and yes, that one is the joke that writes itself.

Every piece comes from a different author. They update separately, they break separately, and they get found separately.

So your website isn't one thing.

It's 23 things lashed together, and every morning you're quietly hoping none of them picked a fight overnight.

I write it line by line.

You need a feature, I write that feature.

No plugins. No third parties. Nothing that updates itself at 3am and takes the site down with it.

Which gets you:

Speed. (People leave after three seconds. That is a real number, not a sales line.)

Google can find you.

Nothing sitting there waiting to be exploited.

Still working in five years, with no rebuild.

It's the question I get most.

It is also the only reason most people put up with WordPress at all.

So every client gets an admin.

Prices, photos, courses, articles — you go in, click, and it's live.

No code. No emailing me. No invoice.

Which means:

You get the part of WordPress that everybody actually wants.

Without the 23 bombs underneath it.

(Technically: Next.js and Sanity. If that means something to you, you know what I'm describing. If it doesn't, you don't need to.)