WordPress pros and cons: an agency’s view

First, a confession: for many years I worked almost exclusively with WordPress. Hundreds of hours in page builders, deep inside themes, hooks and database quirks. So this article isn’t a takedown from the outside. It’s an inventory from the inside. And it turns out more nuanced than either camp would like: WordPress is neither the only tool worth considering nor the dinosaur it’s sometimes made out to be.

If you’re planning a website today, you deserve an honest assessment, not a matter of faith. Here it is.

Why WordPress got so big

First, the facts: according to W3Techs, WordPress runs around 42 per cent of all websites worldwide. Among websites with an identifiable content management system, its share rises to around 60 per cent. No other system comes close.

This success is no accident. More than twenty years ago, WordPress solved a real problem: it made publishing on the web possible for people without programming skills. On top of that came an open ecosystem where anyone could contribute themes and plugins. The result is an infrastructure with a ready-made solution for almost every problem, a tutorial for almost every question and, in almost every town, someone who can work with it.

One clarification up front, because it constantly causes confusion: what we mean here is the freely installable software (available from wordpress.org), not the website builder service of the same name, wordpress.com. The software belongs to you and runs on your hosting. The service is a subscription product with its own rules. Wherever this article says WordPress, it means the software.

The strengths: what WordPress is genuinely good at

Editorial work. At its core, WordPress is an editorial system, and it shows. If you publish posts regularly, work with several authors, and need drafts, revisions and scheduled publishing, you get all of that built in and mature. For content-driven projects with a high publishing frequency, that remains a strong argument.

The ecosystem. Members’ area, events calendar, multilingual content, booking system, shop: there’s a plugin for almost every requirement, often several. With WooCommerce you can run a fully fledged online shop without switching systems. This breadth is unmatched and, for projects with many functional requirements, a real time saver.

Independence. WordPress is open source. Your website belongs to you, runs on almost any hosting and can be moved along with all its content. No subscription model from a website builder provider, no platform that can raise prices or remove features. This point is underestimated until you need it.

Updating content yourself. With a well set-up system and modern tools, clients can update text, images and pages themselves. For businesses that want to change content often and independently, that’s a legitimate and important thing to want.

The downsides: what you pay for

Each of these strengths comes at a price, and it tends to go unmentioned in the sales pitch.

Maintenance is mandatory, not optional. A WordPress site consists of the core, a theme and typically ten to thirty plugins, and all of them need regular updates. Updates can get in each other’s way: after a plugin update the layout has shifted, after a PHP update an old plugin throws errors. If you don’t update, you collect security holes. If you do, you need backups and, when in doubt, someone who can resolve conflicts. None of it is dramatic, but it’s ongoing operational work that belongs in every honest cost estimate.

The plugin zoo. The ecosystem’s strength is also its weakness. Plugins come from thousands of developers, and their quality and lifespan vary widely. Some get abandoned, some get stuffed with ads after being sold to new owners, some slow down the entire website. Every extra plugin means extending trust to a stranger.

Security. WordPress itself is now remarkably robust. Year after year, the security provider Patchstack documents the same pattern in its annual report on WordPress security: the vast majority of vulnerabilities sit in plugins and themes, while hardly anything is found in the core itself. So the problem is less WordPress than what gets installed on it, plus its sheer reach: a system that runs 42 per cent of the web is automatically the most rewarding target for automated attacks. A login, a database and executable code on the server are an attack surface that other architectures simply don’t have.

Performance. WordPress assembles every page dynamically from the database on demand. Caching cushions this well, but it remains a plaster over an architectural trait. In Core Web Vitals analyses of real websites, WordPress sites perform significantly worse on average than modern static frameworks. A carefully optimised WordPress site can be fast. But it has to work for what other systems get for free.

The right question isn’t “What can the platform do?” but “What will it cost me in three years in upkeep, nerves and load time?”

When WordPress is the right choice

All of this adds up to a clear requirements profile. WordPress plays to its strengths when several of these points apply:

• You publish content frequently, ideally with several people and an editorial workflow.
• You need features such as a shop, members’ area, bookings or community that exist as mature plugins.
• You want to update content extensively yourself and change page structures independently too.
• There’s someone who takes long-term responsibility for updates, backups and security, in-house or through a maintenance plan.

A publishing project with daily articles, a club portal with a members’ area, a growing shop: for projects like these, WordPress is still a very good choice, often the best.

From my own experience, there’s one more point to add: the modern tools in the WordPress world are much better than their reputation. Professional page builders have little in common with the cobbled-together messes of ten years ago; in skilled hands, they produce clean, fast and well-structured websites. The problem was never the tool alone, but the combination of a powerful tool and a lack of care. And that can happen on any platform.

When it isn’t the best choice

And then there’s the other, very common case: the business website with five to thirty pages whose content changes a few times a year. Services, About, case studies, contact, maybe an occasional blog article. Exactly the profile of most freelancers and small businesses.

For this profile, WordPress carries weight that’s never needed: a database for content that doesn’t change, a login nobody uses, twenty plugins for features a lean architecture would have built in, and a maintenance contract for all of it. The website doesn’t get better as a result, just more expensive to maintain and slower to run. It’s like leasing a 40-tonne lorry for your weekly shop: it can do everything you need, but you keep paying for capacity you never use, and maintaining a lorry doesn’t come free.

For projects like these, we now mostly take a different approach: websites delivered as finished, static pages, fast, low-maintenance and without an attack surface. We’ve described what’s behind this approach and who it suits in a separate article.

The real cost over three years

“But WordPress is free” is one of the most stubborn half-truths in the industry. The software costs nothing; running it doesn’t. An honest calculation includes at least four items:

• Licences. The good plugins and themes used for professional work are almost all paid, as annual subscriptions. A typical business website quickly adds up to several subscriptions.
• Hosting. WordPress needs a server with PHP and a database, and for decent load times, not a bargain package. Static websites, by contrast, run on the simplest infrastructure, some of it free.
• Maintenance. Updates, backups, security monitoring, resolving conflicts. Either as a monthly maintenance contract or as your own working time, which, honestly, is money too.
• Repairs. The item nobody budgets for: the broken page after an update, the hacked plugin, the migration because the old theme is no longer developed.

None of this is a scandal. It’s the normal price of a dynamic system. The mistake lies elsewhere: these costs are rarely mentioned at the start of a project, and then the low initial quote looks like the total price. So when comparing two quotes, it’s always worth asking: what will this website cost me in year three, not in month one?

A question of tools, not of faith

WordPress helped build the open web, and it remains an excellent platform for content-driven, feature-rich projects. Anyone who tells you across the board that WordPress is dead is selling you just as much of a simplification as someone who reflexively answers every enquiry with WordPress.

The honest order is different: first the requirements profile, then the tool. How often does content change? Who updates it? What features does the site really need, not hypothetically? Who takes care of maintenance? The answers more or less choose the platform for you: sometimes it’s WordPress, sometimes, deliberately, it isn’t.

If you’re facing exactly this decision, whether for a new build or a relaunch of an existing site, get in touch. We’ve seen both worlds from the inside and will advise you based on your project, not on our preferences.