The Achilles heel of WordPress is its backward and brittle storage format: every post is stored in the database, in "html kinda" format, plus random shortcodes initially, and now blocks encoded as JSON inside HTML comments. Plugins then add their own random formats on top of that, and store their metadata in another table, usually in serialized PHP object form.
It's a wobbly Jenga tower of technical debt, and WP's underlying architecture makes this mess fundamentally unfixable. There is zero political will to address these deep-seated design issues, or at least Matt Mullenweg has no will to fix them, which translates in reality to never getting fixed.
They seem to be interested mostly in adding more and more visual editing features that keep making the whole thing more unstable and messy. There's no hope. We already have clients who were with WP for many years switching to Directus and a custom front-end.
The only reason others are still in it is the huge ecosystem and the custom integrations they have built around WP.
The design issues are also in other parts of the system. Major silliness of WP is, that basically every tutorial and documentation encourages a pattern of concattenation, instead of composition. This is in PHP tradition, which just runs scripts from top to bottom, which means you can change code while it is running and next request it will run your changed code, if it passes by that part of the code to handle the request. In the WP ecosystem countless plugins engage in making their parts unreusable, by following this concattenation idea. They will start some HTML element in one part, but not close it. That job they leave to another part, which you just have to implicitly know must come later, to close all the tags. The different parts are described at [1]. This also implies treating HTML as a string, also in old PHP fashion, with all the issues coming along with that.
Worst is, when you have people, who even manage to break composition on the procedure level by doing the following: (1) open php "tag", (2) write function header, (3) close php "tag", (4) write plain HTML inside the PHP function body, which results in outputting that HTML as a side-effect, instead of returning it as result value, (5) open php "tag", (6) insert closing brace of function.
Literally, makes the code only usable in very specific places, where that side-effect is just in time for the document creation, otherwise cannot be used. You cannot use this and then wrap it with some other HTML, because it is already output as a side-effect. Of course since it is stupid tradition to treat HTML as string, you also cannot pattern match on that stuff and cannot have intelligent operations work on the result.
But not only this major F up. No. The use of global state is very pervasive. One doesn't pass in information to templates to then have information locally and render templates independently from the rest of the system. Instead rendering templates happens while frequently retrieving information from the global state.
Another bad design is how one provides metadata for plugins inside comments inside the code of the plugin, instead of having a clearly separate metadata file. Of course this doesn't lend itself well to being edited automatically, as one would have to parse PHP code and then work on an AST to change it. But I guess no one responsible for this design has ever thought that far.
The whole thing feels more like it is made for people, who live edit code on a server and then check 20 times whether it now works and the moment it looks right, they drop everything and call it a day. This is also the impression that the quality of plugins leaves. You want to see bad code, you just grab a random WP plugin.
WP is in essence a guide showing by example how not to develop a website.
A lot of WP's architecture could be fixed internally, with shims added for backward compatibility. I took a stab at doing just that in a fork, but what I really don't know how to fix without major BC breakage is WP's reliance on global state. And these days there seems little point in incremental fixes, owing to the AI elephant in the room that doesn't need further mention. I suppose if WP were my livelihood, I might think otherwise, but even though I have several good friends in the WP community, I've pretty much written off the platform as a lost cause.
I know it's not the main topic of the post, but I think it may be worth pointing out that Bluehost is owned by a company infamous for poor quality hosting solutions and trying to monopolise the web hosting field:
So regardless of whether you go with WordPress or a different solution, you may want to be cautious about that company. They tend to oversell their services a lot, and care mostly about cost cutting.
Unfortunately that industry has been in a race to the bottom for a very long time. Most customers just care about the dollar amount they're paying. In a race to the bottom there is no corner that can't be cut.
I've met so many people over the years who've worked in the industry at some stage (including myself), and not one of us has had a positive experience.
All that to say, it's almost certainly true that unless you've specifically heard otherwise about a hosting company, you're probably supporting assholes whoever you use.
Where is that race to the bottom visible? Surely not in the pricing -- bluehost's intro offers are already expensive (10gb space shared hosting for $3.99 a month -- in 2026?). After a year, it jumps to $11.99 with 12 months terms. That's more than $1 per gb storage. In 2026.
The $10/month gets you storage, but also bandwidth and hosting and a bunch of tooling. Worth it? Probably so if you want something that mostly just works.
Seems like they went through a bunch of vibe coding only to come up with a half-baked copy of Astro. And why not just use Astro? It's got the exact features that they've built, many more, and a large and bustling community.
I had been using WordPress since, what I remember, back in 2004 or 05. I think that was the first time I used WordPress and I stopped using it last year when Vibe Coding helped me build something with NextJS and Sanity and other CMSs as well. I've actually quite enjoyed the Vibe Coding part but I do miss WordPress from time to time.
+1 on Kirby. It brought back fun in working on projects with CMS as a requirement. The cost for a license is easily justified when I calculate working hours and nuisances that would come with Wordpress.
For now I didn't find the comparably tiny plugin ecosystem to be a problem. It's well documented and lets me write missing functionality quickly.
My first encounter with it was because a wordpress project annoyed me so much I started to look around for alternatives. I took the project as a real-world example to take a look at Kirby and rebuild the site in an afternoon.
The Achilles heel of WordPress is its backward and brittle storage format: every post is stored in the database, in "html kinda" format, plus random shortcodes initially, and now blocks encoded as JSON inside HTML comments. Plugins then add their own random formats on top of that, and store their metadata in another table, usually in serialized PHP object form.
It's a wobbly Jenga tower of technical debt, and WP's underlying architecture makes this mess fundamentally unfixable. There is zero political will to address these deep-seated design issues, or at least Matt Mullenweg has no will to fix them, which translates in reality to never getting fixed.
They seem to be interested mostly in adding more and more visual editing features that keep making the whole thing more unstable and messy. There's no hope. We already have clients who were with WP for many years switching to Directus and a custom front-end. The only reason others are still in it is the huge ecosystem and the custom integrations they have built around WP.
The design issues are also in other parts of the system. Major silliness of WP is, that basically every tutorial and documentation encourages a pattern of concattenation, instead of composition. This is in PHP tradition, which just runs scripts from top to bottom, which means you can change code while it is running and next request it will run your changed code, if it passes by that part of the code to handle the request. In the WP ecosystem countless plugins engage in making their parts unreusable, by following this concattenation idea. They will start some HTML element in one part, but not close it. That job they leave to another part, which you just have to implicitly know must come later, to close all the tags. The different parts are described at [1]. This also implies treating HTML as a string, also in old PHP fashion, with all the issues coming along with that.
Worst is, when you have people, who even manage to break composition on the procedure level by doing the following: (1) open php "tag", (2) write function header, (3) close php "tag", (4) write plain HTML inside the PHP function body, which results in outputting that HTML as a side-effect, instead of returning it as result value, (5) open php "tag", (6) insert closing brace of function.
Literally, makes the code only usable in very specific places, where that side-effect is just in time for the document creation, otherwise cannot be used. You cannot use this and then wrap it with some other HTML, because it is already output as a side-effect. Of course since it is stupid tradition to treat HTML as string, you also cannot pattern match on that stuff and cannot have intelligent operations work on the result.
But not only this major F up. No. The use of global state is very pervasive. One doesn't pass in information to templates to then have information locally and render templates independently from the rest of the system. Instead rendering templates happens while frequently retrieving information from the global state.
Another bad design is how one provides metadata for plugins inside comments inside the code of the plugin, instead of having a clearly separate metadata file. Of course this doesn't lend itself well to being edited automatically, as one would have to parse PHP code and then work on an AST to change it. But I guess no one responsible for this design has ever thought that far.
The whole thing feels more like it is made for people, who live edit code on a server and then check 20 times whether it now works and the moment it looks right, they drop everything and call it a day. This is also the impression that the quality of plugins leaves. You want to see bad code, you just grab a random WP plugin.
WP is in essence a guide showing by example how not to develop a website.
[1]: https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/classic-themes/basics...
A lot of WP's architecture could be fixed internally, with shims added for backward compatibility. I took a stab at doing just that in a fork, but what I really don't know how to fix without major BC breakage is WP's reliance on global state. And these days there seems little point in incremental fixes, owing to the AI elephant in the room that doesn't need further mention. I suppose if WP were my livelihood, I might think otherwise, but even though I have several good friends in the WP community, I've pretty much written off the platform as a lost cause.
I know it's not the main topic of the post, but I think it may be worth pointing out that Bluehost is owned by a company infamous for poor quality hosting solutions and trying to monopolise the web hosting field:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group
So regardless of whether you go with WordPress or a different solution, you may want to be cautious about that company. They tend to oversell their services a lot, and care mostly about cost cutting.
Unfortunately that industry has been in a race to the bottom for a very long time. Most customers just care about the dollar amount they're paying. In a race to the bottom there is no corner that can't be cut.
I've met so many people over the years who've worked in the industry at some stage (including myself), and not one of us has had a positive experience.
All that to say, it's almost certainly true that unless you've specifically heard otherwise about a hosting company, you're probably supporting assholes whoever you use.
Where is that race to the bottom visible? Surely not in the pricing -- bluehost's intro offers are already expensive (10gb space shared hosting for $3.99 a month -- in 2026?). After a year, it jumps to $11.99 with 12 months terms. That's more than $1 per gb storage. In 2026.
There is no race to the bottom.
Could you do it cheaper?
The $10/month gets you storage, but also bandwidth and hosting and a bunch of tooling. Worth it? Probably so if you want something that mostly just works.
Seems like they went through a bunch of vibe coding only to come up with a half-baked copy of Astro. And why not just use Astro? It's got the exact features that they've built, many more, and a large and bustling community.
I had been using WordPress since, what I remember, back in 2004 or 05. I think that was the first time I used WordPress and I stopped using it last year when Vibe Coding helped me build something with NextJS and Sanity and other CMSs as well. I've actually quite enjoyed the Vibe Coding part but I do miss WordPress from time to time.
Might want to check out Kirby cms - sounds like you’ve vibe coded your way to something similar but Kirby will have more niceities.
+1 on Kirby. It brought back fun in working on projects with CMS as a requirement. The cost for a license is easily justified when I calculate working hours and nuisances that would come with Wordpress.
For now I didn't find the comparably tiny plugin ecosystem to be a problem. It's well documented and lets me write missing functionality quickly.
My first encounter with it was because a wordpress project annoyed me so much I started to look around for alternatives. I took the project as a real-world example to take a look at Kirby and rebuild the site in an afternoon.
Kirby rocks. It's so much better designed than WordPress.
Chat -> static site
I've gotten my most tech-averse friend on this flow.
WordPress had its time, and I'm thankful for that time. But the overhead is no longer worth it for the broad audience it use to serve