I’ve been building websites long enough to remember when Wix ran on Flash. If you think that sentence makes me sound ancient, consider that the first two sites I ever built were on Geocities. It’s useful to have some sort of anchor point because every few years someone declares WordPress dead, and every few years, we’re still here.
So let’s talk about why, because clients ask. Especially after last year’s headlines.
The drama, and why it didn’t matter
You probably saw some noise in late 2024 and into 2025 about the fallout between Automattic and WP Engine. Lawsuits, public slanging matches, the lot. If you follow WordPress closely, it was genuinely uncomfortable viewing. If you don’t follow it closely, you saw a scary headline and maybe wondered whether your website was about to fall over.
It wasn’t. And here’s why.
WordPress, the software itself, is open source. Automattic is a company that contributes to it and profits around it, but they don’t own it any more than a single contributor owns Linux. The community kept shipping, the codebase stayed solid, and once the dust settled, nothing meaningful had changed for the sites we run. The drama was corporate, not technical.
This is actually the core argument for WordPress over something like Wix or Squarespace, which tends to get undersold. When you build on a closed platform, you’re renting. One board-level decision about pricing, features, or acquisition and your entire online presence is affected. We’ve seen it happen. With WordPress, if a host turns difficult, we move you. If a plugin dies, we replace or rebuild it. You own the database, you own the files, you own the site. That’s not a small thing.
The ceiling you don’t see until you hit it
Squarespace has got genuinely good. I’ll say that plainly. For someone starting out with a small personal site or a hobby business, it’s a perfectly reasonable choice. You get clean templates, no server headaches, and you’re done in an afternoon.
But when a business starts to actually grow, the constraints become visible. You can’t meaningfully modify the hosting stack when traffic spikes. You can’t extend the CMS in ways the platform didn’t anticipate. You’re building inside someone else’s walls, and those walls don’t move.
Webflow is a slightly different case. It’s genuinely powerful for designers, and the visual tooling is impressive. But I’ve watched clients try to manage their own content in it and the experience is often baffling. The front end is beautiful; the editorial experience can be brutal.
WordPress sits at a useful intersection. With the right builder and the right architecture, it’s fast to work in, straightforward for clients to manage, and has no ceiling on what you can build. That combination is rarer than it sounds.
How we actually build
The standard knock on WordPress is that it’s slow and bloated. It can be. A bargain-bin theme, forty-odd plugins, and nobody managing the thing, and yes, it will crawl. But that’s a construction problem, not a platform problem.
We build primarily with Breakdance these days, which we moved to after becoming increasingly frustrated with the legacy builders that load half the internet of CSS regardless of what’s actually on the page. Breakdance loads what the page uses. Sounds obvious. Most builders don’t do it. The practical result is that we’re routinely hitting 98–100 on PageSpeed Insights without having to perform increasingly elaborate caching rituals to compensate for the underlying bloat.
The backend gets the same attention as the front. We use ASE Pro to strip out absolutely everything in the WordPress dashboard that your team doesn’t need. Comments system disabled if you’re not using it. Custom post types properly labelled up. Third party up-sells and unnecessary notifications redacted. Login screen branded to your company. The goal is that when someone on your team needs to update the site, they open a dashboard that looks like it was built specifically for them. The value this can bring is enormous both in terms of added security but also, importantly, in doing away with the burden of unnecessary cognitive load. It shouldn’t feel like you’ve been handed the keys to a spaceship when all you need to do is publish a blog post.
Where the site actually lives
Hosting is the part of this conversation that most agencies gloss over, because it’s easier to put everyone on the same shared server and move on. We don’t do that.
For many clients, we use Hostinger’s LiteSpeed infrastructure. With server-level caching, competitive pricing, and genuinely great performance, it handles the majority of sites we run without complaint. For WooCommerce sites or higher-traffic websites though, we move to a dedicated, customised VPS on DigitalOcean managed through SpinupWP. No shared resources, no performance variability from whoever else happens to be on the same machine. The environment is tuned specifically for WordPress PHP processing, and it shows.
Why this still matters
We use WordPress because it gives businesses something that’s increasingly hard to find online: actual ownership. Ownership of the data, ownership of the infrastructure choices, ownership of the future direction of their site.
We build it properly so it’s fast, we configure the backend so it’s a pleasure to use, and we host it on hardware that matches what the site actually needs. That’s the whole pitch.
If you want a site that belongs to you rather than to a platform’s terms of service, get in touch.