For a long time, I avoided WordPress entirely.
My first experience with it was about five years ago in college, and honestly, it wasn’t great. It felt fragile, slow, inconsistent, and far too dependent on third-party plugins. I remember thinking the security wasn’t particularly strong, and it only took one badly maintained plugin to potentially break the whole site or allow someone to hack it. Updates felt risky, and overall, it didn’t inspire much confidence, for example you update to a newer version, and it breaks everything. The only good thing about it was that it’s free and allows you to create websites quickly with no coding skills.
So I did what a lot of developers do: I moved away from it completely and built my own stuff. Not necessarily because I needed to, but because I wanted to.
I built different versions of my personal website using frameworks I had full control over. Mostly React-based setups, custom backends or using platforms like Supabase, and static sites felt cleaner, more predictable, and more “proper” from an engineering perspective. React SPA apps always felt more modern and faster. WordPress, in my mind, was something I had outgrown. It felt more like a toy and a broken drag-and-drop website builder.
But recently, I decided to give it another try.
What Changed?
Modern WordPress seems different from what I remember. It seems faster, more secure, and none of the plugins that I installed so far has broken my site. Core updates are more reliable, and there’s better awareness around maintaining plugins and keeping installations secure. It’s not perfect, but it’s no longer the mess I remember. A few years ago, when I was finishing my Computer Science Degree, we had a module called Advanced Web Development, where I built a website using PHP, Laravel and MySQL. I’m not a PHP dev by my current job title, but I know some PHP, and WordPress is Open Source and Written in PHP. So it’s not only that the platform improved, but my skillset has also improved, and I came to a realisation that I could use it for a personal website and a blog, and if needed, always extend it by adding some custom PHP and JS.
Why I’m Using It Now
I’m always curious what are people/companies using for their websites. Noticed that huge companies like Microsoft and NASA are actually using WordPress for some of their content. I use the Wappalyzer extension on Chrome, which usually shows what tech stack is being used. Realising that big companies are now trusting WordPress made me curious, so I had to check it out again.
The reason why I started using WordPress again is not only because bigger companies are using it now, but because I realised that there is no point wasting time and energy re-inventing the wheel, for basic use cases, just use the tool that is already built and tested by millions of people. Even though I have previously worked as a Low Code Developer and had this kind of mindset when it comes to work, as a developer, I wanted to have my personal website written in a fancy stack, have great performance and be overengineered, for no reason other than I just thought it was cool.
The Reality Check
I still wouldn’t use WordPress for everything. If I were building a highly interactive application or something with complex business logic, I’d still reach for a more custom stack. If I were building an e-commerce store, I would just use Shopify as it’s cheap, has decent performance and works great for many worldwide brands. But for content-driven sites, portfolios, and even many business websites, WordPress is a lot more capable than I gave it credit for. I think if properly configured, security is not a concern and even then, there is really no point in securing your blogs that much; they don’t contain any personal/valuable data, and are posted publicly anyway.
Final Thoughts
I have no idea how long I will stick with WordPress, and if my opinion on this topic will change, but at the time of writing, I have rebuilt my personal website with WordPress, and the experience so far is great; it only took a couple of hours. Sometimes in the real world, the best tool is not the one with the most features, flexibility and performance but the one that gets the job done. Thanks if you took the time to read this through.
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