Why I stopped using Wordpress

For a long time, I thought Wordpress was the Content Management System I was going to stick with. And for a while it was, but eventually I started to feel like it wasn’t the right fit for me. Whatever I wanted to change, I hit a wall every time that I couldn’t do it without detailed knowledge of the system. And I didn’t. Creating my own template proved to be an insurmountable problem. And then the constant paying. But that wouldn’t be the main reason I decided to walk away from Wordpress.

Wordpress originated as a CMS for blogs, and to this day it still shows a lot. If you want to blog, it’s the best choice. There’s probably nothing simpler. But if you don’t just want to write posts, but want to have a site as well, you’ll run into a little resistance. It’s still easy to do with a few pages, but if you start having dozens of them, it starts to get pretty cluttered.

Wordpress doesn’t have a simple tree in which to sort pages logically. It always displays a list, and you have to find the right page. If you don’t keep a list of published pages in Excel, it’s easy to write another page on a very similar topic because you don’t remember that such a topic is already covered.

I was frustrated by this because I like structure, but I couldn’t reasonably maintain it in WordPress. There are various plugins, but they have their limitations. For example, they are pretty slow. And with Wordpress, every extra plugin multiplies the security risk.

And that was the second reason. My MODx site eventually went down because it kept getting hacked. And when I cleaned it up, it was hacked again within a few days. After that experience, I wanted something secure that was easy to update. And Wordpress can do that, but you have to update it almost constantly because there are security vulnerabilities in plugins almost every day.

I’ve already mentioned templates. Making your own template is an almost insurmountable problem for an amateur. You have to study the whole philosophy of how Wordpress treats templates. And it’s not really a problem that you study in one afternoon and the next afternoon you’re already starting to play around. Plus, each plugin has a slightly different logic and matching the different elements on the site together is a heck of a job too. So in the end, you’re left with pre-made templates, which are often pretty expensive. And that brings me to the last point - the total cost.

Wordpress has a strong community around it, which is its advantage. But unfortunately, it quickly understood the benefits of the software as a service model. Virtually no plugin can be bought as a one-off, they all offer some form of subscription. And it’s very easy to end up paying around 600 Euros a year just to run a website.

And the hosting itself is also quite expensive, because Wordpress needs well-tuned hosting to be fast enough. And that’s another 300 Euro per year if you settle for basic services and pretty hard limits on visitor numbers.

And so it happened that I was looking for a solution and I found HUGO. And I am satisfied.