For years, WordPress was our bread and butter. It's the world's most popular CMS, powers over 40% of the web, and has a plugin for everything. So why did we walk away?
The Breaking Point
It started with client calls at 2am. A plugin update broke the site. A security vulnerability needed emergency patching. A theme conflict crashed the checkout page during a holiday sale.
We realized we were spending more time maintaining WordPress sites than building them. And our clients were paying the price – literally, in emergency fix fees and lost revenue.
The Plugin Problem
WordPress's greatest strength is also its biggest weakness: plugins. Need a contact form? Plugin. SEO? Plugin. Security? Plugin. Speed optimization? Plugin.
Before you know it, you've got 30 plugins from 30 different developers, all updating on different schedules, all potentially conflicting with each other. One bad update and your site goes down.
We've seen sites with 47 plugins installed. That's 47 potential points of failure. 47 things that need updating. 47 developers you're trusting with your business.
The Security Reality
WordPress powers 40% of the web, which makes it the #1 target for hackers. Every security researcher, every script kiddie, every bot network knows WordPress inside and out.
The attack surface is massive: the core CMS, the theme, every plugin, the database, the PHP server, the hosting environment. One weak link and you're compromised.
With Next.js, we deploy static files to Vercel's edge network. No database to inject. No server to exploit. No plugins to compromise. The attack surface is nearly zero.
The Performance Gap
We ran the same content through WordPress and Next.js. WordPress scored 45 on Google's PageSpeed. Next.js scored 98.
That's not a fluke. WordPress loads PHP on every request, queries a database, assembles the page server-side, then sends it to the browser. Next.js pre-builds pages at deploy time and serves them instantly from edge servers worldwide.
Speed isn't vanity – it's money. Every 100ms of load time costs conversions. Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor. Slow sites lose.
The Decision
We stopped offering WordPress not because it's bad – it's genuinely great for certain use cases. We stopped because our clients deserve better than "good enough."
They deserve sites that don't break. That don't get hacked. That load instantly. That don't require constant maintenance.
That's what we build now. Custom Next.js sites, hand-coded, deployed on Vercel, built to last.
Is WordPress Right for You?
Maybe. If you need to publish content daily and want to manage it yourself without touching code, WordPress with a good managed host is still a valid choice.
But if you want performance, security, and a site that just works without ongoing maintenance – we should talk.