I’ve spent most of my career not liking WordPress.
That’s not something I’ve ever made much of publicly, and it’s not because WordPress is uniquely flawed or poorly made. My discomfort has always been quieter than that. It’s about fit.
WordPress is what’s called a CMS—a content management system. In simple terms, it’s software designed to help people publish and manage writing over time. Posts, revisions, archives, comments. A living body of text.
That’s what it was designed and built for.
Somewhere along the way, it became the default way to build almost any small business website. A handful of pages. A contact form. Information that rarely changes. In many cases, no ongoing writing at all.
At my company, SOLUENCY, when we were still building a lot of websites, we tried to resist that default. We suggested simpler approaches when the job called for them—static HTML sites, or other tools that didn’t require much ongoing machinery to keep running. Occasionally we’d recommend something more application-like.
Often, clients still wanted WordPress. So we built WordPress.
A typical WordPress site relies on a database and a runtime environment that wakes up on every page load to assemble what the visitor sees. That design makes sense when content is constantly changing. It makes less sense when the site is effectively the same every day.
The consequences aren’t abstract. Performance can suffer. Security becomes something that has to be actively managed. The system needs attention simply to remain stable.
None of that makes WordPress bad. It just means it’s a system doing work it wasn’t designed to do.
When I first started building websites, tools like Microsoft FrontPage and Dreamweaver were common. They weren’t elegant, and they had plenty of problems, but they assumed something different about the web. A website was a set of files. You made them. You uploaded them. They sat there quietly until you decided to change them.
I sometimes miss that approach.
Not only because it was simpler technically, but a site didn’t pretend to be dynamic if it wasn’t.
What surprised me is that I didn’t fully feel this tension until I launched this site.
Systems & Soil is a blog. It exists to be written into over time. New entries, revisions, continuity. For the first time, deploying WordPress felt correct.
Nothing about WordPress changed. The use case did.
I don’t think the lesson here is that WordPress is good or bad. I think it’s that defaults can make misalignment feel normal for a very long time, and misalignment can become invisible when it’s common enough.
Systems work best when they’re applied to the correct use case.