Why we don't use WordPress for client sites

WordPress powers roughly 40% of the web, and we respect what it did: it let millions of people publish without writing code. But when a business hires us to build a site that has one job — turning visitors into customers — we reach for handwritten PHP instead. Here's the honest reasoning.

The weight problem

A fresh WordPress install ships with a theme engine, a plugin system, an admin dashboard, a REST API, and a database schema designed for a blogging platform from 2003. Your customer wanted to see your phone number and your services. Every one of those layers runs on every single page load — and every layer is a place where speed goes to die.

Our sites ship exactly the code each page needs. No theme engine deciding what to render, no plugin stack firing hooks, no query builder assembling SQL for content that never changes. The result is pages that pass Core Web Vitals without optimization plugins — because there's nothing to optimize away.

The plugin treadmill

A typical small-business WordPress site runs 15–30 plugins: a form plugin, an SEO plugin, a caching plugin, a security plugin (to protect the other plugins), and a backup plugin (for when the security plugin loses). Each one updates on its own schedule, written by a different author, and any update can quietly break your site on a Tuesday at 2am.

We've taken over enough broken WordPress sites to know the pattern: nobody changed anything, and yet the layout is destroyed. With a custom site, the only code that runs is code we wrote — so the only time it changes is when you ask us to change it.

The security math

WordPress isn't insecure because its core team is careless — it's insecure because it's the biggest target on the internet. Bots scan for /wp-login.php on every domain that exists, ours included. A custom PHP site has no admin login URL to guess, no plugin vulnerabilities to inherit, and an attack surface a fraction of the size.

So when would we recommend WordPress?

If your team needs to publish several articles a week without a developer, a managed CMS can be the right call, and we'll tell you that in the first conversation. But for the businesses we serve — contractors, auto shops, restaurants, service companies — the site changes a few times a year, and what matters every single day is that it loads fast, ranks, and converts. That's a job for handwritten code.

Curious what your current site is carrying around? Send us the URL — we'll take an honest look.