The Context

This is not a generic "WordPress is bad" article written by someone who tried it once and gave up. By the time we moved away from recommending WordPress as a default, we had delivered well over 80 WordPress projects across professional services, SaaS, healthcare, e-commerce, and content businesses. We knew the platform well. We knew how to build on it properly.

That experience is exactly why we stopped recommending it. When you build enough projects on a platform, you stop seeing the honeymoon period and start seeing the long tail — what happens to sites 18 months, 30 months, 48 months after launch. The pattern we saw consistently in WordPress sites, regardless of how carefully they were built, was the same pattern. And it was a pattern that was hurting our clients.

The Pattern We Kept Seeing

A client hires us. We deliver a clean, fast WordPress site. We use a reputable theme, a minimal plugin set, good hosting. The site scores 75–85 on PageSpeed at launch. It looks great. The client is happy. We document everything carefully and hand it over.

Twelve to eighteen months later, one of several things has happened. In the best case: the client has been updating plugins inconsistently, the site now loads in 4 seconds on mobile, and they want us to "fix the speed." In a common case: a plugin update broke something — the contact form stopped sending, a layout element disappeared, a page started throwing a PHP error — and the client has been living with it for weeks before contacting us. In the worst case: the site has been compromised. A vulnerable plugin was exploited, malware was injected, the site was blacklisted by Google, and we are now doing emergency remediation instead of building something new.

None of these outcomes happened because the sites were built poorly. They happened because WordPress's architecture — a plugin ecosystem maintained by thousands of independent developers, none of whom coordinate their updates — creates ongoing maintenance obligations that most business owners are not equipped to manage and most agencies do not adequately warn them about.

The Specific Problems

Security

WordPress powers approximately 43% of all websites on the internet. That market share makes it the most valuable target for automated attacks by an enormous margin. The majority of WordPress security incidents are not sophisticated targeted attacks — they are automated scripts scanning for known vulnerabilities in outdated plugins and themes, executing the same exploit across thousands of sites simultaneously. A WordPress site with a single outdated plugin is a site with a known, public vulnerability that automated systems are actively scanning for.

This is not a theoretical risk. Sucuri's annual website threat report consistently shows WordPress as accounting for 90%+ of all infected CMS sites they remediate, despite only being approximately 43% of sites. The infection rate is disproportionately high because the attack surface is disproportionately large.

The response from WordPress advocates is usually "keep your plugins updated." This is correct but insufficient. It places a permanent, ongoing technical responsibility on a business owner who often has no framework for assessing which updates are safe to apply, no staging environment to test updates before applying them to the live site, and no process for monitoring for security notifications. Most small businesses cannot meet this responsibility consistently — and inconsistency is what the attack scripts are waiting for.

Performance degradation over time

A WordPress site's performance does not stay static. It degrades as the plugin count grows — and plugin counts tend to grow, because the answer to almost every new requirement on a WordPress site is "there's a plugin for that." Each plugin adds JavaScript, CSS, and database queries. A site that launched with 12 plugins and a 78/100 PageSpeed score will typically have 18–22 plugins two years later and a 55/100 score, without anyone making a deliberate decision to slow it down.

We have audited WordPress sites for clients that were loading 14 separate JavaScript files and 11 separate CSS files on every page load — each one a tax on the browser before any content renders. Cleaning this up requires either removing plugins (which requires finding alternatives for what each plugin does) or investing in a full performance audit and optimisation engagement. Neither is trivial. Both cost more than the "savings" of having used a free CMS in the first place.

The developer dependency trap

WordPress was originally a blogging platform and its CMS editing experience reflects that heritage. For content types that map neatly to posts and pages, it works adequately. For anything else — custom page layouts, component-based design systems, content types with multiple fields and relationships — WordPress requires either a page builder (Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi) or custom post types with Advanced Custom Fields. Both create editorial experiences that are genuinely confusing for non-technical users and frequently break on plugin updates.

The result is that marketing teams on WordPress sites end up dependent on their developer for changes that should be trivial — reordering sections on a page, adding a new team member with a custom photo layout, creating a new landing page that matches the site's design system. We have had clients describe waiting 2–3 weeks for changes a Webflow Editor user could make in 10 minutes. This is not a failure of the developer — it is an architectural consequence of how WordPress handles custom design.

What We Use Instead

For the vast majority of the projects that previously would have been WordPress builds, we now use Webflow. The performance is better — our Webflow sites consistently launch at 92–97 on mobile PageSpeed versus 65–80 for equivalent WordPress sites. The security surface is vastly smaller — Webflow manages the hosting infrastructure, there are no plugins to exploit, and Cloudflare sits in front of every site. The content editing experience is genuinely superior for non-technical users. The maintenance burden is near zero.

For projects requiring significant custom backend functionality — user accounts, complex APIs, database-driven content at scale — we use Next.js paired with a headless CMS (typically Sanity or Contentful). This stack delivers better performance than WordPress, proper separation of concerns between frontend and backend, and a development experience that makes complex functionality much easier to build and maintain.

Where WordPress Still Makes Sense in 2026

This is not an argument that WordPress should never be used. There are specific situations where it remains a reasonable choice.

Large existing WordPress investments: If you have a 500-post blog, a highly customised theme, dozens of integrations, and a development team already experienced with your WordPress stack, the cost and disruption of migrating outweighs the benefits for most businesses. Invest in proper maintenance processes and tooling rather than a wholesale rebuild.

WooCommerce with an existing setup: WooCommerce is genuinely powerful and has an extensive ecosystem. If you are running a large WooCommerce store with deep customisation and integrations, Shopify migration costs need to be weighed carefully. WooCommerce at scale, properly maintained, is a legitimate platform.

Very large content archives requiring complex taxonomy: WordPress's content management capabilities for very large archives with complex category hierarchies and custom taxonomies are mature and well-understood. For a news publication or large documentation site with thousands of posts and complex filtering requirements, WordPress's CMS capabilities can still be the path of least resistance.

Clients with existing WordPress expertise: If your in-house team already knows WordPress deeply, has established processes for maintenance and security, and has invested in proper staging and backup infrastructure, there is a legitimate argument for staying on a platform your team understands rather than rebuilding on something new.

The Honest Summary

WordPress is not a bad platform. It is an old, powerful, extremely widely-used platform that has accrued decades of architectural decisions made in a different era of the web — before performance became a ranking signal, before security was as adversarial as it is today, before the expectations of web teams around content management modernised substantially.

For the typical business website we build — a professional services company, a SaaS marketing site, a healthcare practice, an agency — the total cost of ownership on WordPress is higher, the security risk is higher, the performance is lower, and the team autonomy is lower than what Webflow delivers today. That is why we stopped recommending it as the default. Not because it cannot build good websites, but because there is now a clearly better option for the majority of what our clients need.

If you are currently on WordPress and wondering whether it still makes sense for your business, book a free 30-minute call. We will look at your specific setup and give you an honest answer — including if staying on WordPress is the right call for your situation.