A Eulogy for WordPress

Let's pour one out for WordPress.

For twenty years it was the answer to one simple question: "I'm not a developer, how do I get a website?" And for twenty years that answer came with a catch nobody read at the checkout. You didn't get a website. You got a part-time job maintaining one.

Death by a thousand plugins

Here's how a WordPress site actually works. You want a contact form? That's a plugin. You want the page to load fast? Another plugin. You want the first plugin to stop fighting the second one? Congratulations, here's a third plugin. Now you've got fourteen plugins from fourteen strangers, each updating on its own schedule, each one a door you left unlocked.

Half of them drag your page speed to a crawl. One of them breaks every single time WordPress updates. And the second something goes down, you're not a business owner anymore, you're an unpaid IT guy googling "white screen of death" at 11pm.

That's not software. That's a group project where everyone else stopped showing up.

The whole point of WordPress just died

WordPress had exactly one real pitch: you don't have to be a developer. That was the deal. That was the entire reason it beat everything else for two decades.

That reason is gone.

You can now build a site from scratch, clean code, no plugin graveyard, no bloat, without being a professional developer. The tools got good enough that "I can't code" stopped being a wall. And spoiler: this site, the one you're reading right now, was vibe-coded. Not hand-typed line by line by some engineer in a hoodie. Built by talking it through, and the guy behind it can actually code when he wants to.

So sit with what that means. If you can get a faster, cleaner, fully-owned site built from scratch without being a developer, what exactly is WordPress still for? Its one job was "you don't need a developer." Well, now you don't need WordPress either.

Own the thing, don't rent the mess

When you build custom, you own the code. It does exactly what you want and nothing you didn't ask for. No mystery plugins, no monthly update roulette, no security hole bolted on by some plugin author who abandoned the project back in 2019.

WordPress made you the landlord of a building you didn't design, held up by duct tape you didn't buy. Custom-built means you own a house that was actually built for you.

So rest easy, WordPress. You had a good run. But the one thing that made you special, we can do that now, without the fourteen plugins and the 11pm panic attacks.

No flowers. Just send a redirect.