a decade late... kidding, i totally get it
Breaking up with WordPress after two decades
31–40 of 41 posts
Re: Breaking up with WordPress after two decades
#32The Achilles heel of WordPress is its backward and brittle storage format: every post is stored in the database, in "html kinda" format, plus random shortcodes initially, and now blocks encoded as JSON inside HTML comments. Plugins then add their own random formats on top of that, and store their metadata in another table, usually in serialized PHP object form. It's a wobbly Jenga tower of technical debt, and WP's un…
They seem to be interested mostly in adding more and more visual editing features that keep making the whole thing more unstable and messy. There's no hope. We already have clients who were with WP for many years switching to Directus and a custom front-end. The only reason others are still in it is the huge ecosystem and the custom integrations they have built around WP.
Directus seems an unorthodox idea for a website. Is this a marketing post?
Re: Breaking up with WordPress after two decades
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where is that race to the bottom visible? Surely not in the pricing -- bluehost's intro offers are already expensive (10gb space shared hosting for $3.99 a month -- in 2026?). After a year, it jumps to $11.99 with 12 months terms. That's more than $1 per gb storage. In 2026. There is no race to the bottom.
Could you do it cheaper? The $10/month gets you storage, but also bandwidth and hosting and a bunch of tooling. Worth it? Probably so if you want something that mostly just works.
After a terrible, possibly criminal experience with a hoster, I ended up with: https://www.interserver.net/
I am very happy. The speed is insane. I always thought and was told that WP is the reason for a slow website. No, it was my host. I pay around 10 USD per month but I think the smaller plans starts lower.
For what it's worth, I am very happy with them. But I only host a few WP and FreshRSS. I think they support python too but for Django I use: https://www.pythonanywhere.com/ I pay 5 USD a month there but I think this plan is not sold anymore.
Re: Breaking up with WordPress after two decades
#34Wordpress is done, SaaS is done. Static Software is done. Now people need dynamic, fully personalised and compounding software.
WordPress is dynamic and incredibly customizable. You could vibe code a huge variety of web applications onto WordPress. Not saying that’s a good idea. But WordPress is successful exactly because it’s dynamic and highly personalizable. So your comment makes no sense.
Re: Breaking up with WordPress after two decades
#35[dead]
Re: Breaking up with WordPress after two decades
#36Wordpress is done, SaaS is done. Static Software is done. Now people need dynamic, fully personalised and compounding software.
Sure buddy. Wake me up when it actually happens. What good is being able to vibe code all your software if you have to maintain it all yourself after? On Anthropic's token quota no less?
Re: Breaking up with WordPress after two decades
#37Wordpress is done, SaaS is done. Static Software is done. Now people need dynamic, fully personalised and compounding software.
Usage stats - still on the up. ~37 millions sites up from ~32 million a year before https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/WordPress
I had a friend who used it for promoting businesses and one the main advantages was it wasn't "dynamic, fully personalised" which meant you could use standard plugins, swap in different programmers who knew how it worked and so on.
Re: Breaking up with WordPress after two decades
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
They seem to be interested mostly in adding more and more visual editing features that keep making the whole thing more unstable and messy. There's no hope. We already have clients who were with WP for many years switching to Directus and a custom front-end. The only reason others are still in it is the huge ecosystem and the custom integrations they have built around WP.
Directus seems an unorthodox idea for a website. Is this a marketing post?
Nope, I just found about it recently. It seems familiar for a WP user but decoupled from the front-end. We decided to try it - time will tell if it's a good decision or not.
Re: Breaking up with WordPress after two decades
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
The design issues are also in other parts of the system. Major silliness of WP is, that basically every tutorial and documentation encourages a pattern of concattenation, instead of composition. This is in PHP tradition, which just runs scripts from top to bottom, which means you can change code while it is running and next request it will run your changed code, if it passes by that part of the code to handle the req…
A lot of WP's architecture could be fixed internally, with shims added for backward compatibility. I took a stab at doing just that in a fork, but what I really don't know how to fix without major BC breakage is WP's reliance on global state. And these days there seems little point in incremental fixes, owing to the AI elephant in the room that doesn't need further mention. I suppose if WP were my livelihood, I might…
I worked with and advocated for WP for projects for years. It’s not pretty, but it is well-supported and well-understood; it gets the job done. With Matt’s treatment of WPEngine (with whom I’ve worked with on and off over many years, and have had nothing but good experiences) I’ve written the project off. It’s not just his response to WPE, but the threats, the dictatorial reactions to anyone speaking up, the blatant takeover of plugins etc. I was sad at first, but I’ve come to peace with never touching WP again if I can help it, and this is as a top contributor to the WP StackExchange - I _loved_ the project and the community, and helping others made my heart genuinely happy.