Recently, I’ve been publishing a decent amount of content around the topic of WordPress. Most of it has been short-form video, and in those videos I’ve been highlighting some of the fundamental differences between WordPress and a more modern development stack, like Next.js.

As you’d probably expect, the reactions have been mixed.

On one side, there are plenty of people who have already moved to a more modern stack and are genuinely happy they did. On the other side, there are folks who are still firmly planted in WordPress land and are convinced that WordPress is still the right, correct, or even best option for building client sites or running their own business sites.

For the sake of this piece, I want to set development nuances aside as much as possible and talk about this from a business perspective.

The Comment That Sparked This

Someone recently left a comment on LinkedIn on one of my videos. In that video, I was comparing site performance between a WordPress agency’s own site and one of my sites built on Next.js, similar to the breakdown I share in my WordPress vs Next.js comparison.

What I showed was pretty simple. My site was a standard five-page informational site with content. Nothing fancy. Right out of the box, it had a near-perfect score on Google PageSpeed Insights.

The WordPress site, by comparison, was failing in nearly every category. Mobile performance was down in the 60s. If you are not familiar with PageSpeed scoring, that is extremely slow.

That matters because mobile users are far more likely to leave before a site finishes loading. That is why mobile performance is weighted so heavily in tools like PageSpeed Insights. Slow mobile sites absolutely lose businesses money, which is exactly why I offer a free site audit to identify the biggest bottlenecks quickly.

The comment I got in response was essentially this:

“You can make WordPress fast. You don’t need to switch dev stacks.”

I have not responded directly to that person, but I wanted to respond more broadly here, because that statement reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of where the web was 20 years ago and where it is today.

WordPress Is 20-Year-Old Software

If you are using WordPress, you are using software that is roughly 20 years old. WordPress was first released in 2003 as a blogging platform built on PHP and MySQL, as outlined in the official WordPress history.

Pause for a second and really think about that in internet time.

Twenty years ago, people were still using floppy disks. The translucent fishbowl iMacs were everywhere in schools, complete with those hockey puck mice. If you have no idea what I am talking about, there is a decent chance WordPress was created when you were a very small child, or before you were born.

The internet changes fast. New tools, frameworks, and patterns emerge every few years. That does not mean you need to rewrite your site every two years, but it does matter where your foundational software comes from and how much legacy baggage it carries.

Where I’m Coming From

For context, I am a 15-plus-year WordPress developer.

Over that time, I built dozens and dozens of custom themes and plugins for clients, businesses, and myself. I even co-owned a WordPress theme and plugin marketplace called NotablePress, which my partner and I sold several years ago.

For the majority of WordPress’s existence, I used it heavily and pushed it to its absolute limits.

I say all of that to make this clear. I do not dislike WordPress because I do not understand it. I stopped using WordPress because I understand it extremely well.

The spoiler is simple. I no longer use WordPress for anything. Not for a five-page site. Not for a SaaS product. Not for a marketing site. Not even for a blog, which is what WordPress was originally designed to be.

What WordPress Was, and What It Became

Early WordPress was genuinely great. It was a clean, simple writing experience. It made publishing your own content on your own site easy at a time when most alternatives were clunky or inaccessible.

Over time, blogging slowly declined as social media and platforms like Substack became more prominent. Blogging did not disappear, but it stopped being the primary focus of the web, a shift often discussed in broader conversations about the evolution of blogging on the web (Wikipedia).

WordPress responded by shifting its identity.

The WordPress plugin ecosystem and theme marketplace exploded. On the surface, this made WordPress more flexible. Underneath, it introduced endless complexity, vulnerabilities, exploits, crashes, and sites getting hijacked through malicious or poorly maintained plugins.

Then came Gutenberg.

The Gutenberg editor was first introduced as a plugin and later merged into WordPress core with the release of WordPress 5.0.

Gutenberg marked a major philosophical shift. WordPress stopped positioning itself primarily as a writing platform and started positioning itself as a page builder. Instead of long-form content, you were now assembling pages from blocks, widgets, shortcodes, and layout components.

This was met with a lot of hostility at the time, which is why the Classic Editor plugin still exists today.

Later, WordPress doubled down and pushed toward full-site editing, allowing users to build headers, footers, navigation, and layouts entirely through blocks, as described in the Block Theme and Full Site Editing documentation (WordPress developer docs).

At that point, WordPress was no longer pretending to be a simple publishing platform. It was trying to be a full site builder.

The problem is that many other tools already do that job better.

The Problem WordPress Cannot Escape

There is a word you will hear in development circles that perfectly describes WordPress today.

Cruft.

Cruft refers to layers of old, often unnecessary code that cannot be removed without breaking everything. It exists because of backward compatibility, not because it still serves a purpose.

Under the hood of WordPress, you will still find relics like pingbacks and trackbacks. You will find WordPress Multisite, which is still notoriously complex. You will also find legacy widgets, sidebars, and APIs that remain for historical reasons rather than modern relevance, as outlined in the Widgets API documentation.

This matters because you can never start with a blank canvas in WordPress.

Whether you install a theme, add plugins, or hire a developer to build a custom setup, you are always building on top of 20 years of accumulated cruft.

That means WordPress starts slow by default.

“You Can Make WordPress Fast”

Yes, you can make WordPress faster.

But look at what that actually requires:

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Can you ride a bike to a neighboring state? Yes. Would it be easier to drive a car or take a flight? Obviously.

When someone says it is not worth switching stacks, what they are really saying is that they do not understand how much better modern frameworks actually are.

The Modern Default Is Speed

What if I told you I could build a site with the same functionality as most WordPress page builders in under two hours, and it would be faster, cheaper, easier to update, more secure, and require zero plugins? The delivery process is straightforward when it is built on a modern stack, which I outline in how it works.

Something that would take days or weeks in WordPress.

This is not preference. A modern site is better in every measurable way.

WordPress has zero real advantages over modern solutions, especially once you compare long-term maintenance and risk.

People often say plugins are the advantage. From experience, plugins are the liability. They are outdated, require constant attention, and dramatically expand the attack surface of your site.

From a business perspective, I constantly see companies paying WordPress developers indefinitely just to keep their site running. In reality, they would be far better off having a modern site built once and performing minimal upkeep afterward. If you want real-world examples of where WordPress maintenance goes sideways, review the incident breakdowns.

With modern frameworks, speed is not something you chase. It is the default.

The only way to make a modern site slow is by building it poorly.

The Takeaway for Business Owners

If you find yourself cycling through developers, fighting plugins, dealing with constant issues, or feeling like your site should be better than it is, understand this.

It might not be the developer.
It might not be the theme.
It might not be the plugin.

It might be the entire WordPress ecosystem.

Trying to make WordPress behave like a modern platform is like trying to get a horse and cart to perform like a car in a world where cars already exist.

It is time to move on from 20-year-old website software and use tools built for the modern web. Tools that are faster, more secure, more reliable, and actually designed to help your business grow. If that shift is already on your mind, start with why teams leave WordPress.

That is when your site can finally start serving your business rather than diverting time, attention, and resources away from it.