WordPress powers over 40% of the web, making it one of the most widely used content management systems (CMS) in existence. Yet, among software engineers—especially those who specialize in backend development and scalable web applications—WordPress has a reputation for being inefficient, bloated, and frustrating to work with.
I hate WordPress. I’ve spent countless hours dealing with messy codebases, troubleshooting plugin conflicts, and optimizing slow sites. But here’s the thing: WordPress is still great and necessary because customers want it. No matter how much I dislike working with it, businesses and clients continue to demand WordPress solutions, and for good reason.
1. Why Engineers Hate WordPress
Spaghetti Code and Legacy Baggage
WordPress started in 2003 as a simple blogging platform and evolved into a full-fledged CMS. Unfortunately, its core codebase carries a lot of legacy design choices, leading to:
- Global functions and variables: Instead of modern encapsulation, WordPress relies on global functions, making it easy to introduce conflicts.
- Mixing PHP, HTML, and Business Logic: Many themes and plugins contain PHP logic mixed directly into templates, violating software design best practices.
- Backwards Compatibility at All Costs: WordPress prioritizes compatibility with old plugins and themes, often at the expense of performance, security, and maintainability.
The Plugin Hell
Plugins are a double-edged sword: they make WordPress flexible, but they also create major headaches:
- Bloated and Inefficient Plugins: Many plugins load unnecessary scripts, slowing down websites.
- Security Risks: Poorly maintained plugins are one of the leading causes of WordPress hacks.
- Compatibility Nightmares: Plugins frequently conflict with each other, leading to endless debugging.
Performance Issues
WordPress is not built with performance in mind:
- Heavy Database Queries: WordPress stores everything in a MySQL database, which leads to inefficiencies as a site scales.
- Bloated Themes: Many themes include unnecessary CSS and JavaScript, hurting page speed.
- Scaling Challenges: High-traffic sites require extensive optimization (e.g., caching, CDNs) to perform well.
Customization is a Pain
For non-developers, WordPress is easy to customize. But for engineers, it’s frustrating:
- Modifying Core Behavior Requires Workarounds: Hooks and filters feel more like hacks than clean abstractions.
- Gutenberg Editor Conflicts: The React-based block editor adds complexity.
- Lack of a Modern Development Workflow: Unlike frameworks like Next.js or Spring Boot, WordPress lacks standardized build processes, dependency management, and testable architecture.
Security Nightmares
WordPress is a frequent hacking target:
- Frequent Vulnerabilities in Plugins and Themes
- Brute Force Attacks on Login Pages
- Lack of Default Security Best Practices
2. Why WordPress Is Still Great and Necessary
Despite all these flaws, WordPress remains the best option for many businesses and non-technical users. Here’s why:
1. Clients Love It
Most clients don’t care about clean code, scalable architecture, or software best practices. They just want a site that looks good, works well, and is easy to manage. WordPress delivers on this.
2. Rapid Development and Low Cost
For businesses that don’t have the budget for a custom-built application, WordPress provides a cheap and effective solution. They can get an e-commerce store, a blog, or a portfolio site up and running within hours.
3. Huge Ecosystem and Community Support
With thousands of themes and plugins available, WordPress allows businesses to add functionality without hiring developers. And if something goes wrong, there are countless tutorials and forums for support.
4. SEO and Marketing Advantages
WordPress has excellent SEO plugins (like Yoast) and marketing integrations, making it easy for businesses to optimize their sites for search engines without needing technical expertise.
5. It’s Familiar and User-Friendly
Many business owners and content managers already know how to use WordPress. Switching to a custom-built CMS or headless system often requires retraining, which they don’t want.
3. Better Alternatives Exist—But Clients Don’t Care
For engineers building modern web applications, there are far better alternatives:
- For Static Sites: Next.js, Astro, or Hugo offer faster and more secure solutions.
- For Custom Web Apps: Django, FastAPI, and Spring Boot provide scalable, maintainable backends.
- For Headless CMS Needs: Strapi, Sanity, and Contentful provide structured content management without WordPress bloat.
But at the end of the day, most clients don’t want to hear about better alternatives—they just want a WordPress site that works.
Conclusion
I hate WordPress. Many software engineers hate WordPress. But it’s still one of the most widely used and necessary tools in web development because it gives non-technical users exactly what they need: a simple, flexible, and cost-effective solution.
As engineers, we can complain about WordPress all we want, but as long as businesses keep demanding it, we’ll continue to work with it—whether we like it or not.
Top comments (16)
It is that i will do it myself mentality that is hurting people in the end. Because they have a data breach by a bug in a plugin they installed. Or because they have to pay developers to sink in hours and days to fix the mess.
I'm just sad that it also gives PHP a bad perception. Just because of the unwillingness to evolve with the base. As far as I know it doesn't even support composer.
I understand where you’re coming from, and you’re right that WordPress can be a security nightmare, especially with the “do-it-yourself” mentality. But from my personal experience, clients often hate the idea of moving away from WordPress because they’ve either heard or experienced horror stories. They’re afraid of being ripped off by developers, or worse, ending up with a website that only works when they call you for help.
The biggest fear is that, once they’re locked into a system, developers can charge exorbitant fees for simple changes, leaving them feeling powerless. This is why, despite WordPress’s flaws, many clients choose to stay with it: it’s familiar and they feel in control—until they realize it’s often more work than it seems.
From the perspective of a freelancer, you need to recognize that when you work with WordPress, you’re not just serving your client. They’re WordPress’s customers, and you’re simply the middleman making things work.
Unfortunately, that’s the reality of working with clients who are fearful and don’t want to risk an unpleasant experience again. It’s all about trust, and often, the WordPress ecosystem provides that (even though it’s far from perfect).
I see the perspective of those people. When your business is not internet related, a website, SEO, SEA and all the other things are a cost you can't see the direct the benefit of.
The strongest thing that is driving Wordpress is that there is so much free stuff. Competitors like Wix, Squarespace and other services have no free plan. That is the benefit of being a product that is under a foundation.
The next step for a business is to select an agency to provide online services for you. And as you mentioned there are agencies that ask a lot of money for simple changes. The other side of the coin is that something that seems to be simple can be very complex because of the consequences. I'm not saying it is always one or the other, there are many colors of gray.
I believe the idea of a free, or nearly free, beats trust. That is also why people use online office suites, email services and so on.
I think as a developer, freelance or not, you should be a gatekeeper but be a transparent one.
If the site is mainly static pages Wordpress is good enough. For all other situations use another solution.
As a developer I'm not excited to work within the confines of an online service, but if that is within the budget a company provides that is the best solution in that case.
With all the different options to choose from nowadays, letting people stay on a platform you know is flawed the way people want to use it is in my eyes not doing your job correct.
I have been hesitating long before starting Drupal development. For the same reason I dislike Wordpress now, not keeping up with the language evolution.
A client once shared with me that they wanted to make a simple change to their website, and the developer who built it handed them an enormous bill for the task. They then turned to YouTube, followed a tutorial, and made the change themselves in just five minutes. It’s a clear example of how some people exploit the situation—I'm not even convinced these individuals are true software engineers. They might just have watched a few WordPress tutorials and realized they could make a lot of money doing basic work without really understanding the technology behind it.
I completely agree with your perspective on the broader issue. For businesses not deeply involved in the digital world, the value of things like SEO, website optimization, and online marketing can be hard to grasp. WordPress thrives because it offers so many free resources, which makes it a no-brainer for many, especially compared to platforms like Wix or Squarespace that don’t have a free plan. The open-source nature of WordPress and its massive community are huge benefits.
You're also spot-on about the grey area when it comes to simple changes that can unexpectedly become more complex due to the consequences. There are certainly agencies out there charging far more than what is warranted for minor updates, but as developers, we have to be transparent about the true complexity of tasks. It's crucial to deliver value honestly and clearly.
When it comes to choosing the right platform, I agree that WordPress works well for basic, static websites, but for anything more intricate, it’s often better to go with a different solution. As you mentioned, WordPress can be limited when it comes to staying current with technological advancements. Part of our job as developers, whether freelance or not, is to recognize when a project requires a more robust approach than what a platform like WordPress can provide.
But when I have these discussions with clients, it either goes over their heads or they just don’t want a system that locks them into me. It can be frustrating, like trying to start a fire with two sticks when there's a flamethrower right next to me. Maybe I'm just a bad communicator, though.
Have you tried selling them migrations, from wordpress to X?
That way they still have to pay whatever the fees are for solution you recommend afterwards, but they have a clear outlook on the costs.
And if they only pay for the migration you did your job and you can feel happy because you helped them move to a better solution.
I see what you’re saying, but they really like the WordPress interface and tools like Elementor. It gives them that sense of control and ease when customizing things. If I suggested something like Django, I know they’d probably complain about the coding and the fact they wouldn’t be able to tweak things as easily. The funny part is, they don’t actually do that much customizing themselves anyway—it’s more about the comfort and familiarity they have with WordPress.
It is natural for people to reject change. You can document the actions in Wordpress with the ones on platform X as a part of the migration. That way it will give them more confidence.
I would not do one suggestion, I would present several options. And make a pros and cons list for each of them. By giving them options they will feel more in control.
I'm not a sales person, and I never will be, but I have seen how they work and learned from them.
Thanks for the advice, hopefully it works :D
WP's a useful backend, and if we bother to (over)write the front end markup, we can have a lightweight IndieWeb CMS that lets our users own their content thanks to open source software. But I still agree with most of your points.
That sounds really interesting! How exactly do you go about overwriting the frontend in WordPress? I’m curious to hear more about your approach since it’s not something I’ve explored in depth.
For a start, we can start our own header template part with
<!DOCTYPE HTML>and only call WP functions explicitly when and where we need them, and we don't need Full Site Editing,theme.jsonetc. even when we want to enable the Gutenberg Block Editor. I have shared some of my WordPress struggles and solutions şn this series:dev.to/ingosteinke/classic-themes-...
Awesome! Thank you so much!
I might have a different perspective on WordPress because first I do have a technical background, with that said, WordPress for me is a means to an end.
Basically, I leverage it, to build solutions to generate revenue.
To me, it would be suicide to start any business and not know how to run the business. For example, You never open a restaurant unless you personally know how to cook.
Of course, I am always in state of learning, but if you know what to do, you can avoid 95% of the problems WordPress will throw at you.
You also need to know all the various areas of WordPress, you don’t have to be an expert, but you need to have a certain amount of knowledge and skill set.
I don’t disagree with this at all. My background is in full-stack SaaS development using Angular/React, Java/Node.js/Python, so I’m used to having a lot of flexibility in how I build things. The issue I have with WordPress is that it feels like it limits my ability to create truly creative solutions. It’s great for certain use cases, but when I want to build something more custom or innovative, I often find myself fighting against its constraints rather than working with them.
All good points, including the comments.
Thank you!