The Perils & Pitfalls of WordPress: Just Say No!
At Lost Highway Media, many of our clients are former WordPress users who turned to us for rescue, and nothing speaks louder than their reviews and testimonials.
Since the dawn of the internet age, people have looked for ways to build professional websites without becoming software engineers and learning to write code. Remember Microsoft FrontPage? Adobe PageMill? NetObjects Fusion? They all claimed to be the solution, but they all failed miserably, ending up in the dustbin of internet history.
But the hope persisted.
Enter CMS platforms like WordPress and Squarespace, along with their cousins, website builders such as Wix and Weebly. These platforms currently dominate the conversation when business owners decide they need a new website. WordPress alone powers more than 40% of all websites on the internet. But popularity doesn’t equal quality, and it certainly doesn’t mean WordPress is the right choice for building a reliable, professional website.
WordPress Is a Blogging Engine
When planning a nice anniversary dinner with your spouse, you probably wouldn't pull up Google and type in a search for "nearest McDonald's drive-thru." Likewise, when looking for a professional web design agency, you probably shouldn't type in a search for "nearest WordPress experts." But type in a search such as "WordPress sucks" or "I hate WordPress", and you'll have enough reading material to keep you up nights for weeks. Much of that material is written by people who make their living with WordPress and have become exasperated enough to to post publicly about its perils and pitfalls!
WordPress wasn’t designed to build websites. It started life in 2003 as a blogging platform. Its core function was to let people publish posts, organize them by date and category, and allow readers to comment. As bloggers increasingly felt the need to include website functionalities, third-party developers started offering “plugins” to provide them.
Today, WordPress remains a blogging engine. Everything else—ecommerce, contact forms, image galleries, etc.—all require plugins and add-ons created by thousands of different developers, each with varying levels of skill, commitment, and quality control. Each of these plugins represents a potential point of failure, a security vulnerability, and a compatibility nightmare. A WordPress website is like a Frankenstein monster held together by duct tape and bailing wire, and as a tool for building professional websites, it's one of the worst disservices ever foisted upon an unsuspecting public.
Trapped In a Template
Rather than requiring the user to build a website from scratch, WordPress and those other CMS/website builder platforms operate on a template system, which accounts for their popularity. Many users make the commitment before realizing what it means: your website has to fit within the constraints of a “theme” designed to be generic. You’re decorating someone else’s house, not building your own. Problems arise right out of the starting gate: you want your navigation menu to look and work a certain way, but your company logo “breaks” the theme's header. You need a specific layout for a section, and that layout is not included in the theme.
“Premium” themes compound the problem by cramming in countless features, trying to be all things to all people. The result is a bloated mess that loads tons of CSS and JavaScript your site doesn’t need, slowing everything down while giving you a bewildering array of options to configure. What you wanted was a banana. What you got was a giant gorilla holding that banana, surrounded by an entire untamed jungle.
A Haven for Hackers
WordPress websites are compromised constantly, and it’s not hard to understand why. When you’re running the world’s most popular content management system, you become the world’s most popular target for hackers and malicious actors.
The attack surface is enormous, and Hackers don't need to be particularly sophisticated. Automated bots constantly scan the internet looking for WordPress sites running outdated software or vulnerable plugins. Once they find a way in, they can inject malware, steal data, send spam emails from your server, use your site to attack others, or deface your pages. The cleanup process is painful and expensive, often requiring you to hire a security specialist to disinfect your site and properly plug the holes.
Yes, you can take precautions—security plugins, regular updates, strong passwords, firewall rules. But notice what's happening here: instead of spending time running and growing your business, you're continually bolting security measures onto an inherently insecure foundation and playing an endless game of whack-a-mole with vulnerabilities. Professional, custom-coded websites don't carry this same burden of legacy issues and third-party dependencies.
Complicated, Convoluted, and Confusing
For a platform that promises to make website building accessible to non-technical users, WordPress has become remarkably complicated. The dashboard, not unlike the cockpit control panel of a modern jetliner, presents you with an overwhelming array of menus, settings, and options. There's the classic editor, the block editor (Gutenberg), the customizer, the theme options panel (which varies by theme), plugin settings scattered across various locations, and multiple ways to accomplish the same task.
Then come the updates, which seem to arrive with exhausting frequency. WordPress core updates. Plugin updates. Theme updates. PHP updates on your server. Miss one, and you might have security vulnerabilities. Apply one, and you might break your site. It's not uncommon for a routine plugin update to cause conflicts with other plugins, or for a theme update to change how your site looks, or for a WordPress core update to break a plugin that hasn't been updated to work with the latest version.
This creates a perpetual state of anxiety for WordPress site owners. Every time you log in and see those update notifications, you face a dilemma: apply the updates and risk breaking something, or ignore them and risk security vulnerabilities. Many users understandably feel trapped, lacking the technical knowledge to troubleshoot problems when updates go wrong, but understanding enough to know that clicking "update" is playing Russian roulette with their website.
The Database Bottleneck
Here's where we get into the technical weeds a bit, but it's important to understand: WordPress is almost entirely database-driven. When someone visits your WordPress site, the server doesn't simply send them a pre-built HTML file. Instead, WordPress springs into action, querying a MySQL database multiple times to retrieve your content, assemble your page template, apply your theme styling, run your plugins, and finally generate an HTML page on the fly to send to the visitor's browser.
This happens for every single page view, every single time. The server does all this computational work over and over, recreating the same pages again and again, even though the content probably hasn't changed since the last time someone visited.
The result? Slow load times. Painfully slow load times, especially on shared hosting where your site competes with dozens or hundreds of other sites for server resources. Page speed matters tremendously—for user experience, for conversion rates, and for search engine rankings. Users abandon slow-loading sites. Google penalizes them in search results, speaking of which...
The SEO Problem
WordPress advocates often tout the platform's search engine optimization capabilities, but let's examine what's really happening here. Search engines like Google work by sending out bots (called crawlers or spiders) that crawl websites and index their content. They're looking for text, structure, links, properly labeled images, fast load times, and mobile-friendly designs.
The database-driven nature of WordPress creates an immediate problem: your content lives in a MySQL database rather than in readable HTML files. Search engine crawlers can't access your database or read its contents. They can only read what gets generated and sent to them when they visit your URL.
WordPress does generate HTML for crawlers, but the platform wasn't built with SEO as a primary concern. Out of the box, WordPress doesn't create optimal title tags, meta descriptions, structured data markup, XML sitemaps, or many other elements that modern SEO requires. So what do WordPress users do? They install SEO plugins—Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO, and others.
These plugins aim to optimize your database-generated content for search engines, adding missing elements and providing checklists to help you improve it. They're better than nothing, certainly, but they're problematic solutions to problems that shouldn't exist in the first place. They add more database queries (slowing your site further), sometimes conflict with other plugins, require configuration and ongoing management, and still work within the constraints of WordPress's underlying architecture.
Meanwhile, a properly hand-coded website can be built with SEO considerations from the ground up—clean semantic HTML, optimized site structure, fast load times, and direct control over every element that search engines consider necessary. No plugins needed, no compromises required.
The Solution
If WordPress and the like are such problematic platforms, what's the solution? The answer is clear: the best, most effective websites are those handcrafted by skilled developers who know how to write code. At Lost Highway Media, many of our clients are former WordPress users who turned to us for rescue, and nothing speaks louder than their reviews and testimonials.
A custom-coded website doesn't rely on generic themes designed by someone else. It's built specifically for your business, your brand, your specifications. Want a unique feature? A developer can seamlessly integrate it into your website. Need a specific layout? It can be coded from scratch. Every element exists because you need it, not because it came bundled with a bloated theme.
Custom websites are inherently faster because they're not database-driven behemoths generating pages on the fly. They're lean, efficient, and contain only the code necessary to make them work. There are no unused theme features, no conflicts between plugins, no excess database queries slowing everything down.
Security improves dramatically. Without an ecosystem of themes and plugins, the attack surface shrinks enormously. There's no core to exploit, no plugin vulnerabilities to discover. Updates are controlled and purposeful, not the constant barrage that WordPress requires.
SEO becomes straightforward: you control the code, you control exactly how search engines see your site. Clean, semantic HTML is the default, not something you're trying to achieve through plugins and workarounds.
The idea of building a professional website without learning to code is appealing. But consider the total cost of ownership: the security incidents and cleanup fees, the hours spent troubleshooting plugin conflicts, the compromised performance affecting your business, the limitations preventing you from implementing exactly what you need. Suddenly, the custom option doesn't seem so expensive, and the results speak for themselves in speed, security, flexibility, and long-term reliability.
Just say no to WordPress and WordPress web design companies. Don't rely on a platform used as a shortcut for those who don’t know how to write the code for professional, responsive, standards-compliant websites. The real solution is to trust an expert who has invested the time to master their craft. Your website is usually your first impression, your digital storefront, your 24/365 sales rep. Doesn't it deserve better than a compromised platform that was never designed for what you're asking it to do?