Let’s get one thing out of the way.

WordPress isn’t misunderstood.

It isn’t a hidden gem.

And it isn’t “the best choice” just because it’s the most common one.

WordPress started life as a blogging tool. It grew fast, spread everywhere, and eventually became the default answer to almost every website question. That doesn’t mean it’s the right answer.

For the kind of custom, long-term websites I build, I choose not to use it.

Here’s why. 

WordPress is a hack stack pretending to be a CMS

WordPress was built to publish blog posts. That DNA is still there. Posts, pages, comments, categories. Everything else is duct tape.

Over the years, WordPress has been stretched to do things it was never designed for. Online shops. Complex layouts. Membership systems. Booking platforms. All technically possible, but rarely elegant.

To make that work, most WordPress sites rely on layers of add-ons and workarounds. From the outside, the site looks fine. Underneath, it’s a patchwork.

That doesn’t mean WordPress is bad. It means it’s being asked to be something it never really was.

Flexible often means fragile

WordPress is often described as flexible. What that usually means is that you can keep bolting things on until the site behaves more or less how you want.

Each extra feature brings its own settings, rules, and assumptions. Over time, small changes start having unexpected side effects. Something unrelated breaks. Editing one thing affects another.

It’s not always obvious why, which makes even small updates feel risky.

“Easy to edit” can quietly become “easy to break”

WordPress gives editors a lot of freedom. Too much, in many cases.

Visual editors, layout controls, and endless options make it possible to change almost anything, including things that really shouldn’t be touched.

I’ve seen plenty of clients stop editing their own websites because they’re worried about breaking the design. That’s not user-friendly. That’s anxiety disguised as flexibility.

A good content system should make the right changes easy, and the wrong ones hard.

Maintenance is baked in, whether you want it or not

With WordPress, updates are constant. The system updates. The add-ons update. The theme updates. Sometimes they agree with each other. Sometimes they don’t.

That means regular maintenance is not optional. And even then, updates can still cause unexpected problems.

Most clients are never told this up front. They just hear “WordPress is free” and assume the site will quietly look after itself.

It doesn’t.

Problems tend to appear later, not at launch

Many WordPress sites look fine on day one. The trouble shows up months down the line.

A feature stops working after an update. The site slows down. Something breaks and no one knows why. The person who built it is no longer around, and fixing it becomes harder than rebuilding it.

This isn’t dramatic. It’s common.

Popular doesn’t mean appropriate

WordPress is popular because it was early, accessible, and everywhere. That worked, and fair enough.

But popular doesn’t mean appropriate. It just means common.

Plenty of things are common because they’re quick and familiar, not because they’re the best long-term choice.

Why this matters

I don’t avoid WordPress to be difficult or contrarian.

I avoid it because I build websites that are meant to be stable, understandable, and calm to live with. Sites where editing feels safe, changes behave predictably, and maintenance doesn’t loom in the background.

For that kind of work, WordPress gets in the way.

So no, I don’t use WordPress.