Tired of WordPress? So Am I.

WordPress is a content management system. That's a fancy name for a tool that makes building a website easier. You log in, click around, and change things. It was built to be simple, and simple to add to.

Back in the 90s, we all started with plain HTML. Every page was a file. Changing a phone number meant editing code. Then the 2000s showed up with Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress. The promise was simple: let regular people run their own site.

Here's where it went sideways. WordPress turned into a system cobbled on top of another system.

The nesting dolls

Picture a set of Russian nesting dolls. You open the big one, and there's another one inside. Open that one, and there's another. Keep going, doll after doll, until you reach the tiny one at the center.

That's your website. The tiny doll in the middle is your content. The hours, the phone number, the thing the customer came for. Around it sits the Elementor doll. Around that, the WordPress doll. Around that, PHP and the server.

Every visitor has to open every doll before they get what they came for. And every doll is one more thing that can crack.

Why we stacked them

So why did we do this? We wanted people to get into their own website. Make their own changes. Do their own updates. It was meant to be a way to engage with your online presence.

What came of it is the opposite. Most owners aren't looking to engage with their website. They want it to do one thing. Make the phone ring.

About that flair

There's a scene in Office Space where a restaurant manager gives a waitress a hard time for wearing only the minimum amount of flair. You know the one. Buttons, pins, the whole vest.

Think about the last time you went to a drive-thru. "Welcome to McDonald's, can I take your order?" That's the script. Now think about a sit-down restaurant. The server has some attitude. Some personality. It's part of why you came, and part of why you go back.

That's flair. And here's the problem with a heavy stack of dolls: you spend all your time keeping the dolls from cracking. Nobody has time left for flair.

Is WordPress still doing the job?

I don't think it is.

Everyone will tell you it's fine. Use a caching tool. Use a tool for this, and a tool for that. But every fix is another doll. You're no closer to solving the problem. You're just adding to the stack.

A recent PHP security release shows how this plays out. The bottom doll got patched. But a patch at the bottom doesn't fix anything above it unless everything above it gets updated to match. Miss one layer, and it can leave you exposed. Or it can just stop working with the new version. Either way, somebody has to be watching.

What I kept running into

On the sites I've managed, I kept running into the same two things.

First, the sitemap. Yoast and Elementor were picking up everything. Taxonomy pages. Image pages. Template pages. Not just the pages and posts that actually matter.

Second, Google Analytics. It was getting pushed to places it didn't belong, and that made pages load slower.

Slow pages and a messy sitemap mean Google sees a worse version of your site. And ranking on Google is already the hard part.

I'm switching back

So I'm pulling back. I'm going back to the original: simple, hand-coded sites. Fewer layers means less to update, less to fix, and less to pay for. In my experience, it costs people less, not more.

It also lets us work hand in hand with AI. A simple site is simple enough for AI to help check, set up, and maintain properly. That's the part WordPress made hard.

An escalator, not an elevator

I want to be clear about what that means. AI is an escalator, not an elevator. It does a lot of the work, but you still step on it, and you still decide where you're going. Somebody has to direct it, check it, and answer for it.

And here's what AI doesn't do. It can build the site. But the human puts in the connection. The emotion. The flair.

Your site has one job. Make the phone ring. The flair is why they call you.