A quarter century of websites, and why I stopped reaching for WordPress

I have been building websites since 2000, first with Microsoft's tools. Around 2004 I found WordPress and it felt like seeing the light: a site you could build quickly and hand to a client to edit. For years it was the obvious answer. Twenty years on, I look at what that ease accumulated.

• The ease was real, and the rule still holds: use WordPress when a carefully crafted plugin does exactly what you need and nothing else would.
• I am not alone in saying it out loud. A creator building sites since 1998, with a channel built on WordPress tutorials, needed a new site this week and made it in plain HTML, online in "less than an hour". His words: "WordPress won by making websites easy to create."

• Every plugin hands part of your security to developers you do not know, on their schedule. The holes were usually fixed. I was never one hundred per cent sure.
• The channel itself can change overnight. In September 2024 WordPress.org cut WP Engine off from its update servers, and on 12 October it replaced Advanced Custom Fields in its own directory with its own fork, without the developer's consent, until a court ordered it returned that December.

Source: «I Spent 20+ Years Building Websites: Here's What I'd Build Instead Now» (Creator Alchemist, 29 Σεπτεμβρίου 2026)