If you're running a design or marketing agency, you've probably thought it: WordPress isn't made for this. You've known it deep down inside; you've felt that something is wrong with the way most agencies rely on it so much. Yes... deep down, you've admitted to yourself that WordPress is kind of a trash solution for anything but a simple blog, even if only subconsciously.
Unless you're one of those people.
Look, I'll admit that there is certainly some value to WordPress if you're running a blog. Or if you started with a blog and expanded into any of the things that have been properly added on as plugins that fully (and properly) extend the WordPress functionality with additional codebases, like WooCommerce. But all too many SMB sites that I come across are using WordPress because they were sold it as the best tool around and have come almost to the point of zealous belief in that misguided notion.
In this article, let me address three common myths around WordPress for development and marketing use.
Myth #1: WordPress is a top-tier offering.
Somewhere along the way, many marketers and web designers (and even some developers) began thinking that WordPress running almost half of all websites and somewhere between 60 to 80 percent of all CMS sites made it a good platform. Let's be clear: good and most used are not always synonymous. Frankly, WordPress is pretty good as a blog-only site tool, or a headless blog CMS paired with other tools in a well-engineered stack, but beyond that it's not good at all, its jury rigged (more on this in a moment).
The WordPress codebase has always been problematic. Consider, or research if you're unaware, the historic (and still current) issues with heavy database queries, slow page building and loading, improper semantic HTML, over-scoped (global) variables, lack of any modularity, and... I'm tired of listing, frankly, and we haven't even scratched the surface. Many of the core structural issues date back a quarter of a century to the b2 blogging tool from which WordPress was forked.
In 2026, Hostinger published statistics for WordPress that claimed the average desktop loading time for an average WordPress site was 2.5 seconds, and 13.25 seconds on mobile. Contextualize that for a moment: over 13 seconds to load a site on mobile. Goodbye time-on-page goals and hello bounce rate nightmares! But those load times aren't always created by bad blog implementation, it's from all of the other utter shit people are trying to do and pass off as acceptable.
All-in-all, WordPress makes for a fine blogging system with a simple homepage, but anything more than that and the technical debt begins to pile up. Remember the jury-rigging claim? Within WordPress, everything is treated as a blog post... your posts, pages, menus, attachments, navigation; all of this is stored as if it's a blog post. So, excuse me when I say that WordPress is great for a simple blog, but if you're using it for virtually anything else, you might as well be the type of person who uses a hammer on screws, or a hair dryer in a cardboard box to bake a cake. I've heard it rationalized, in a way, as not being different than having to deconstruct these elements for database storage or JSON serialization, but that's nonsense. In the latter examples, the structures are purpose-built abstractions that use custom elements (functions, storage tables, schemas, etc.) whereas WordPress forces everything into the existing elements for blog posts.
Top tier offering? No. t's a one-trick pony that's good at being jury-rigged. Don't ask a pony to perform like a donkey or a horse.
Myth #2: WordPress is good for custom development.
You know those marketing firms or development agencies that do everything in WordPress? Yeah, you do. You may even work for one. They hype WordPress as a great development platform, when it’s anything but. To see why, I only need to point back to the everything-as-a-post approach mentioned above. But the issues go even deeper than that when considering WordPress extensibility through plugins or custom app development. Consider the two broad types of plugins that people build: true feature‑extension plugins and surface‑level wrapper plugins.
The first type uses real developmental best practices. They come with their own organized codebase, functioning services, internal APIs, and integrate with WordPress through well‑engineered hooks. In this approach, an actual tool is being built — WordPress is just the front‑end for exposing functionality to end users. The tool could continue to work perfectly well if paired with another system or given its own UI and admin elements. But this type of development is rare save for one exception: third party tools that are made to work with a number of systems and one of them happens to be WordPress. These aren't WordPress-specific developments, they're fully third-party tools that happen to work with WordPress. This is how it should be.
Then there’s the other, much larger, category of plugins— the type most of you are shipping or using, if we’re being honest. These surface‑level plugins are just sloppy procedural code crammed into functions.php and packaged as if they’re legitimate plugins. The worst offenders go beyond the realm of plugins and are pretending to be full web applications built on WordPress while secretly relying on nothing but custom taxonomies to deliver their “features.” Nothing says competent developer like forcing a content‑labeling system to impersonate a database schema, after all, amiright?
In fact, I recently dealt with a situation where the original website developer for a roughly $20M SMB had to be brough back in to clarify how to execute a fairly simple process. The client was upset with me, the firm I was representing, and even their previously contracted firms for essentially being so stupid as to not know how to execute the task. As it turns out, the feature we needed was a few lines of commented out code in the functions.php file with no in-code comments, no documentation, no plugin wrapper, and no UI surfacing. That led to a few "fun" conversations, and frankly, I still wasn't able to break the "WordPress is our tech stack" incoherent nonsense that had been instilled in them as a core level belief. You can lead a horse to water...
Real developers work on WordPress and many of its plugins, sure! But if you're using WordPress as a framework for building mission-critical business apps beyond the CMS without a separate codebase and proper APIs and hooks, we need to question your competency.
Myth #3: WordPress is the marketer's toolkit.
Having taught undergraduate digital marketing for over a decade now and having been involved in several agencies during that time, I'm likely the least apologetic about this claim: only bad marketers view WordPress as their tool of choice, or as an entire toolkit. Harsh, maybe, but marketers hyping up their WordPress skills screams red flag to me for a number of reasons. It'd be like saying a wrench set is your entire toolkit for building a shed or repairing a car.
First, and let's recap here: WordPress is a simple blogging tool. Yes, it's been morphed and cajoled over time to do practically everything imaginable for a website, but as I've emphatically proclaimed in this piece, that's not its purpose in theory or real code. Many tools are taken beyond their intended purpose—hell, one of the top income-generating specialties in my professional career has been application mockup in Excel—but in those cases, the tool can well enough handle the task by having the correct structures in place for other reasons, or eventually growing in scope (with further development) to include the user-invented use case.
While Automattic signaled years ago that they wanted WordPress to become the "operating system" of the web, they haven't put in the development work to adopt even the most commonly extended use cases of WordPress. The internal architecture is still poor, the code is still hard coded for posts only, and for marketers... even simple requirements like meta-tags aren't accessible without a third-party plugin. I just can't take a marketer seriously if their entire exposure to site management, SEO, advertising, social integrations, newsletters etc. all centers around the rather make-shift WordPress ecosystem. They're getting derivative tools provided for them as participants in a common ecosystem, but without the full knowledge of what's happening, including best practices, in the vast majority of the discipline.
Why trash WordPress?
Trashing WordPress isn't my intent. My intent is to clearly assert that in many use cases that WordPress is considered a reasonable platform, the opposite is true. This over-exuberance is certainly good for WordPress and Automattic, and they've seemed to embrace it, but only in a half-assed manner. The question is: why haven't they graciously accepted that gift in the form of coding effort instead of merely in words? Why not in active development for extensibility, for proper data schemas, for updated core libraries?
WordPress agencies promote about their deep understanding of WordPress, and how to develop for it. They tout it as a turnkey solve-all for clients. In reality, it's not. The agency is puffing up a third-party tool to erase their own weakness... that they only know how to do one thing, how to work with one tool. The reality that I wish their clients, and other agencies, would see is that they're essentially using Duplo blocks to try to build a Technic set. While Duplo is fun, it's for building a certain thing at a certain level, and you need to move to another type of Lego set to go outside of that scope. One can certainly use WordPress to build a facsimile of a web stack, just as I can use Excel to build app mockups, but the mockup or facsimile will never be as small, fast, lean, clean, or mean. Your conversions, bounce rate, following, and all other relevant metrics will suffer in one way or another. Ultimately, they'll prevent you from optimizing revenue, and therefore your return on investment will be less than potential.
Use WordPress if you like it, certainly. To run a blog. As a part of your larger web stack.
