I’ve worked in web development for several years now and the one thing that often comes to mind is “Why is WordPress so terrible yet so popular?”. Many people grow frustrated with its complex plugin ecosystem, find it slow, annoying to add content to, and very cumbersome to maintain long term.
So I sat back and installed WordPress on it’s own and had a good look at it. What does it actually do without plugins and what can actually be accomplished? The short answer: very little unless you learn to adapt to its way of working, but the way it works is highly divisive for both content editors and developers.
Because a standard WordPress configuration normally looks like this:
- Simple 301 Redirect (Though I recommend Redirection these days)
- Yoast SEO
- WP Super Cache
- Elementor (though gutenberg has improved a lot lately)
- Woocommerce
- …and a bunch more
It makes sense, because without these, you would not be able to:
- Handle old links from other websites pointing at now broken content without redirects
- Understand and modify your content’s SEO presence.
- Speed up the loading of your website through caching pages.
- Have more powerful UI/UX tools
- Have an ability to sell your products
These are fundamental for the majority of WordPress users and without them, they would simply not be able to use it effectively. However, arguably, this is what detracts from WordPress’s experience. These should instead be baked into the platform properly and cohesively without having to search and find them.
Not to mention, and no offense to these plugin developers, they don’t exactly fit the design guidelines of WordPress, so they lack that polish which causes a lot of cognitive fatigue in users who have to workaround some UI quirks such as putting settings in places that aren’t intuitive to find.
…Not to mention the incessant ads everywhere…
I know some vendors will install curated plugins inside a WordPress instance and this works well, but it’s a stop-gap measure… a lot of these plugins require paying for to use which begs the question, is WordPress even free if we have to pay third party developers… It gets confusing fast.
Needless to say WordPress’s plugin ecosystem is chaotic, expensive to maintain, and very taxing on the mind to navigate, so why do people still use them? Because WordPress is fast to set up and beginner-friendly.
Don’t get me wrong though, WordPress can and will trap you into spending long hours debugging ajax requests, search algorithms, slow pages that sometimes through a bad gateway error suddenly, and many unusual CSS tweak issues, but it’s still considerably faster than rolling your own CMS only to do the very same thing.
Many people will use Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify even, but those don’t give them nearly as much rope to decide what to do with it. They stay in their lane but WordPress will let you build as few or as many lanes (enough to cause traffic jams!). It has a lot of range.
I’ve even built massively complex enterprise systems with WordPress and stretched it beyond it’s limits with ACF, Gravity Forms, with a CDN powered statically served Next.js frontend communicating to WordPress via GraphQL for asynchronous requests.
However, the more common it is, the more it needs to cater to everyone, which naturally creates chaotic systems. Neither complex nor simple system is good or bad, it just depends on what you value and whether it matches with the values of the system itself. WordPress values flexibility. However, I believe if WordPress made a few more concessions by baking into it simple tools such as redirect functionality and caching for instance, it would improve its usability and improve cohesion.
If you ask me what I value though, it’s clarity. What gives me clarity is knowing which system to use for which job in a practical, impartial way. From my experience, I love the flexibility of WordPress and it’s given me a simple blogging site without the extra fuss until if I decide to change it over to something else.