After Years of Web Development, Here's Why I Abandoned WordPress — and What I Recommend Now
Just a few months ago, I built a small prototype that changed everything.
I manage several WordPress websites, and I find them frustratingly hard to customize. WordPress was a great tool in the 2010s, but today it has become bloated and complex. It is the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world — and that popularity has come at a cost. Customizing themes to look exactly the way you want is increasingly painful. Finding the right plugin for a given task can be difficult, especially since different plugin versions often aren’t compatible with each other. Out of curiosity, I tried rebuilding one of my sites using a different approach — a static site generator (SSG). In under an hour, I had something better than what I had spent months refining.
I have been doing web development since 1993 — the year the Web was born. I started in my parents’ basement. Since then I have done a bit of everything: pure HTML static pages, the CMS era with Drupal and WordPress, collaborative editing with wikis, the arrival of Node.js, JavaScript frameworks, and now AI transforming everything. I even worked as a research assistant for Serge Proulx at UQAM’s digital communications laboratory, formerly known as LabCMO. At the time we were studying the emerging effects of social media on society. When I predict the end of the CMS era here, it’s with the perspective of someone who has witnessed major shifts in this industry from its very beginning.
