I started building WordPress sites in 2009. WooCommerce came shortly after. Every page builder, every caching plugin, every "ultimate" SEO suite — I've used them, broken them, fixed them, and billed for them. WordPress paid my bills for almost two decades. I owe it that much honesty.
And the honest thing to say is: I'm done.
Not because WordPress is bad. Because the world it was built for doesn't exist anymore.
The Ecosystem Stopped Evolving
When WordPress was the answer, the question was: "How do non-technical people publish to the web?" In 2009, that was a real problem, and WordPress solved it beautifully. A theme, a few plugins, a login screen — anyone could have a site.
But the ecosystem aged in place. The default editor still mangles formatting in ways it did when George W. Bush was president. Gutenberg arrived, and most of us turn it off. The plugin economy that made WordPress powerful is now the same plugin economy that breaks sites every time PHP updates, every time a dependency shifts, every time two well-meaning developers ship conflicting code on the same Tuesday when you're out for tacos and margaritas.
Meanwhile, the things WordPress was supposed to be good at — blogging, content management, SEO — got eaten by tools that do one thing exceptionally well. Substack and Medium publish better than the WordPress editor ever has — and outside of the editor, distribute better where people actually read.
Shopify runs commerce without a single plugin conflict. Static sites load faster, rank better, and get hacked roughly never.
The Security Tax
If you've managed WordPress sites at any scale, you know the tax. Backups. Update windows. Emails that never arrive from a form. Plugin audits. The 3 AM email that a client's site is showing pharmaceutical spam in Google results because a deprecated form plugin had a known vulnerability for six months.
That tax used to feel like the cost of doing business. It doesn't anymore. Not when the alternatives have effectively zero attack surface.
What Changed For Me
For years, the developer crowd has said the same thing: "Just code it." And they were right, technically — but they were missing the part that mattered. Clients can't edit code. They need a way in. WordPress gave them that way in, and that's why it won.
What changed is that "a way in" no longer requires a CMS, a database, and 47 plugins. A static site with content stored in structured files can now be edited by a client through chat, text, or email. The system reads the request, makes the change, deploys it. No login. No editor. No "I broke something, can you fix it?"
This isn't theoretical. We've built it. It's how each.life sites work now.
Speed, Accessibility, SEO — Out of the Box
Static sites don't need a performance plugin. They are the performance plugin. Lighthouse scores in the 95–100 range without optimization theatre. Accessibility baked in because there's no theme bloat fighting you. SEO clean because the HTML is clean.
Shopify covers the commerce side with the same logic — themes that are actually maintained, an admin that actually works, and a security model that isn't your problem.
For the kind of sites I build now — service businesses, brands, professional firms — this combination is simply better. Faster to load. Easier to maintain. Safer to own.
Respect Where It's Due
WordPress isn't dying. It runs a meaningful slice of the internet and will for years. For some use cases — large editorial operations, membership sites, certain ecommerce edge cases — it's still defensible. I'm not here to tell anyone to migrate.
I'm just telling you what I'm doing. After 17 years, I'm building somewhere else.
Tools change with the times. So do the people who use them.
