WordPress is a content management system (CMS), which is just a fancy way of saying it helps you manage all the stuff on your website—like blog posts, product pages, or even restaurant menus. WordPress has been around since 2003 and was created by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. According to W3Techs, WordPress powers a whopping 43.4% of all websites. That’s a lot of sites. Originally, WordPress was just a simple blogging platform. But over the years, it’s grown into a full-blown CMS used for everything from portfolios to ecommerce stores. With that growth, though, it’s also become bloated—packed with plug-ins, page builders, and complexity that most small businesses don’t actually need.
According to W3Techs, WordPress powers a whopping 43.4% of all websites.
Reasons We Don’t Use WordPress
Security Risks from Plugins
WordPress is a HUGE target for hackers because of its popularity. Vulnerabilities are often found not in WordPress itself but in poorly maintained or outdated plugins, which can lead to serious security issues like SQL injection and XSS attacks. Keeping everything up-to-date is a full-time job, and many small business owners simply don’t want to deal with that strain.
Maintenance Can Become a Money Pit
Even though WordPress is free, running a secure, reliable WordPress site without downtime will almost always cost you:
- Paid plugins or themes
- Premium hosting
- Developer support for updates and bug fixes
What starts free can quickly become hundreds or thousands of dollars per year.
Slower Performance due to Bloat
WordPress websites rely heavily on plugins and page builders, which can slow things down significantly. Each extra plugin or poorly optimized feature adds weight—and in the small business world, speed matters (for both users and SEO).
Not As User-Friendly as Advertised
Many clients expect WordPress to be easy — but the reality is often confusing dashboards, unexpected popups, and buried settings. Making even small edits or page changes can become overwhelming without technical help.
Code Quality Varies Widely
Because WordPress is open-source, themes and plugins come from many contributors. That diversity is great… until a poorly coded theme or plugin creates performance bugs, layout issues, or worse — security holes. Inheriting and maintaining such a site can be a nightmare .
What WordPress Is Good For
Even though we don’t use WordPress, we totally understand why it’s so popular — and we respect what it’s done for the web. WordPress helped millions of people get online, especially back in the early days. It made blogging easy, helped businesses launch websites without hiring a developer, and gave people loads of plug-ins and themes to play with.
It’s still a great option for:
- Bloggers who want something flexible and customizable
- Content-heavy sites like news or magazine-style websites
- Businesses that need lots of plug-ins or complex functionality out of the box
- Teams with internal devs or agencies who are experienced with WordPress and can manage updates, security, and performance issues
That said — just because we don’t use WordPress doesn’t mean we can’t build those kinds of sites. If you need a blog or a content-rich website, we’ve got tools that do all that (without the bloat or security headaches). We focus on lightweight, fast, cost effective and secure websites using modern tools — so you still get all the features without the WordPress stress.
What We Use Instead (And Why It’s Better for Your Business)
Instead of relying on WordPress and its endless maze of plug-ins, we use modern static site generators — tools that let us build lightning-fast websites using clean, secure code. These aren’t drag-and-drop templates. Every site we build is custom-coded by professional software engineers with over a decade of experience across industries like tech, real estate, government, and small business. We’re not hobbyists or fresh college grads — we know what we’re doing.
But what’s a static site, exactly?
A static site is a website that’s pre-built and doesn’t rely on a bloated backend (like WordPress) to generate pages on the fly. That means:
- Faster load times — Your site loads in a snap, which keeps visitors happy and improves SEO.
- Stronger security — No logins, no plug-ins, no databases = fewer things to break or get hacked.
- Lower maintenance — You don’t need to worry about updates or plugin conflicts.
- Affordable hosting — Static sites are lightweight and can often be hosted for free or very cheap.
- You own your content — Your content can live in local files, not locked up in someone else’s database.
- You get a user-friendly interface — Out of the box, we give you a simple interface to update your content whenever you want. No coding required.
This modern approach is perfect for small businesses that want a fast, professional, and secure site with none of the typical WordPress headaches.
Wrapping It Up
So, let’s recap. We’re not here to bash WordPress just for the sake of it — it’s been around for decades and powers a huge chunk of the internet. But for our clients — mostly small businesses who want fast, reliable websites without the tech headaches — WordPress just isn’t the right fit.
In this article, we covered:
- Why we don’t use WordPress (think: bloated plug-ins, security holes, and performance issues).
- What WordPress is still good for (like blogs or e-commerce sites with very specific needs).
- What we use instead: modern, static site generators with custom code built by real-deal software engineers with over a decade of experience.
- The big win? Our default setup let’s you own your content, everything is fast, secure, and we include a super simple editing UI for you — no tech skills required.
If that sounds like what you’ve been looking for, and you’re ready to ditch the WordPress stress, contact us and let’s talk about how we can build something amazing for your business.
