I saw Nat on Twitter asking why anyone wouldn’t start a WordPress blog-
https://twitter.com/natmiletic/status/1627747198753718273?s=46&t=d3TR_YVzX1HbflcpD2ndyg
His question is rhetorical, but here are my top twelve reasons not to start a WordPress blog:
- Source control is a nightmare.
- Porting a website from one domain to another is a 10-step process.
- It’s the most often hacked platform in the world. One could say that WordPress is a victim of it’s own success, but it’s simply a fact that no website platform gets hacked more often or more systematically.
- Plug-ins outside of the top 100 are a massive security question. They’re…probably…secure? Maybe? Usually?
- Plug-ins can register alerts anywhere about anything.
- Gutenberg blocks are a confusing and incomplete answer to page builders.
- Custom field support requires a plug-in, even though literally millions of people use it with WP. Why hasn’t that gotten integrated into core?
- The actual writing experience is mediocre.
- Querying using the WP query builder is a confusing mess.
- As far as I know, the database has no “model” layer to help developers know what is in the database and how to access it.
- The average WordPress website gets inexplicably slow after about a year, unless someone with a lot of technical skill is maintaining it.
- I haven’t actually seen someone make good use of the built-in comment system in years, even though it ships as part of core for every WordPress install.
Don’t get me wrong, I want to love WordPress. I’ve invested thousands of hours working on it, led technical teams on massive builds, and served millions of page views using it. But I spun up a website for a medium sized organization last year and spent over $1000 in plug-ins just to get the system working. The other day, I spent two hours trying to search-replace a database just to get a 5 page website online.
I love WordPress. I want it to be better. But it’s a mess right now