WordPress didn't die — it became the internet's Excel spreadsheet
Everyone mocks WordPress. Everyone is running on it. And the agency industry is doing just fine off that exact loop.
I hate fixing WordPress, and I still end up fixing it — probably the most common complaint I've heard in this line of work. Open a client's site, find a plugin last updated in 2016 still active, and know you've just lost the afternoon.
Developers have joked that WordPress is "about to die" for a decade now. It hasn't. It's done exactly what Excel did in the world of spreadsheets: become the platform everyone complains about, everyone wants to leave, and almost nobody actually does — because the cost of migrating away is bigger than the cost of putting up with it.
Nobody picks WordPress twice because they love it
The familiar loop: an agency sells a cheap WordPress site to a client who has no idea about hosting, plugins, or security updates. Two years later the site is slow, hacked, or simply too fragile for anyone to touch. Another agency shows up, offers to "rebuild from scratch", and sells it as a shiny modernization project — when really it's just cleaning up the previous owner's technical debt.
My slightly cynical read: this isn't really a technology problem, it's a business model. Nobody in that chain is genuinely incentivized to tell the client to leave WordPress for good, because "fix it forever" is a far more stable revenue stream than "do it right once and be done".
- Easy, no dev required
- Low starting cost
- Massive plugin ecosystem
- Technical debt piles up with every update
- Security risk from unmaintained plugins
- Lock-in to whichever agency holds the keys
- "Rebuild" costs more than doing it right the first time
WordPress doesn't have a technology problem. It has a business-incentive problem built around it.
If you still choose WordPress — and plenty of the time it's still the right call — choose it knowing you're signing up for maintenance forever, not a one-time saving. That's the difference between the loop using you, and you walking into it with your eyes open.