WordPress: Should You Use It in 2025?

So you’re thinking of starting a WordPress website in 2025? 🤔 Everyone and their mother has probably told you it’s the platform, the only serious choice, the gold standard. And look, I love WordPress. I use it, I still do, and I’m going to continue to do so.

But there are some real, honest-to-god reasons not to use WordPress that nobody talks about because they’re too busy being fanboys. Let me give you the straight dope so you can make a smart decision, not a pressured one. 👋

If you’re weighing your options on which platform to build your site on, this is the frank breakdown you actually need before committing.

High Upkeep: WordPress Maintenance Is No Joke

This is the one that catches people off guard the most. There’s a lot of maintenance required to keep a WordPress website running.

Between plugins and theme updates and all the security vulnerabilities that come when you don’t update, you might find yourself doing a lot more maintenance than you thought you were going to. I’ve seen people set up their WordPress site, feel great about it for about two weeks, and then get blindsided by the sheer volume of stuff that needs tending to.

“It’s definitely not a set it and forget it type of platform.”

And I mean that. It’s an open source platform, so anyone who has access to the back end could stick any files that they want anywhere and completely destroy everything or add malicious files. That sounds dramatic, but it happens. Regularly.

The average WordPress site runs somewhere between 20–30 plugins, and every single one of those needs updating. Skip one update? That’s a potential security hole. Skip a few? You’re basically leaving your front door unlocked.

Conversely, something like Shopify is a closed ecosystem and people can’t just go in there and mess with the core files. If that sounds confusing, don’t worry about it. The point is that there’s a little bit more maintenance with a WordPress website than something that is a closed system like Shopify.

WordPress Security Issues Are Real (And Constant)

This one’s a biggie, and it ties directly into the maintenance problem. Security is not instant with a WordPress website.

WordPress websites are notorious for getting hacked because the architecture of a WordPress website has been around since forever. Hackers know it through and through. They know how to access your login pages. They know how to do brute force attacks. They know the default file structures.

That’s why you use plugins to change that login page URL, but the point still stands that security is not instant with a WordPress website. You need to download plugins and configure them correctly to have a secure website.

The numbers back this up hard. WordPress sites account for the vast majority of all hacking attempts on CMS-based websites, which makes sense given that WordPress powers around 43% of all websites. The sheer scale of WordPress’s market share makes it the biggest target by far, and attacks on WordPress sites number in the tens of thousands per minute across the platform.

And here’s the part nobody mentions until it’s too late: the cost adds up fast. Security plugins can run anywhere from $100–$300+ per year, and if you actually get hacked? Recovery services can cost between $500–$3,000 or more depending on severity. That’s money a small business owner or solopreneur probably didn’t budget for.

On a platform like Shopify or Squarespace, you just don’t deal with this. They handle security infrastructure for you. It’s baked in. You’re paying for that in your monthly subscription, sure, but you’re also not lying awake wondering if some bot is probing your login page at 3am.

WordPress Slow Performance: It’s the Plugins (Mostly)

So a lot of people complain about WordPress being slow. Now, that’s not WordPress itself that’s slow, even though it is written in PHP, which is a much older web technology. So it’s not going to be as fast as like a Next.js site.

If that doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry about it. But the point is that it’s older tech, and it may seem slower because of that older tech stack.

Here’s the real story though: WordPress can be just as fast as any other website if you don’t install a ton of plugins in it. That’s the one thing that keeps everybody bogged down on a WordPress website. The amount of plugins people download.

Every plugin you add is more code that runs on every single page load. Stack 25 or 30 of those and you’ve got a site that feels like it’s running through mud.

Look at that table for a second. WordPress on managed hosting actually beats Shopify and performs way better than Squarespace and Wix. But WordPress on cheap shared hosting? It nearly doubles in load time.

So the performance issue isn’t really a WordPress problem, it’s a hosting + plugin bloat problem combined with a “how many plugins did you install” problem.

Still though, if you’re not a technical person and you’re not going to be careful about plugin management and hosting choices, this will be your reality. And that’s a totally legitimate reason to skip WordPress.

The Learning Curve Is Steep (And the New Editor Isn’t Really Helping)

If you have a Wix or Squarespace website, it’s probably a lot easier to get running. But if you have a WordPress website, you really need to know how to use that thing. There’s a lot of files, a lot of not super intuitive UX things that you have to get around knowing. It’s a lot to learn.

I’m very comfortable with it, but I know the limitations and people just… it looks overwhelming because it is overwhelming, frankly. But once you get past that hurdle, it’s really fun in my opinion to use WordPress. Power comes with complexity.

So what did WordPress try to do to fix this? Back in December 2018, they released the Gutenberg block editor (WordPress 5.0) to modernize the whole experience and make it feel more like a drag-and-drop builder. The feedback? Largely mixed to negative.

A lot of users say it’s actually slower than the classic editor, requires more clicks for simple tasks, and confuses non-technical people even more than the old system did. One developer quoted clients saying stuff like “I used to update my site myself, now I pay someone because the new editor confuses me.” That’s not great.

The drag and drop functionalities of a lot of other platforms like Squarespace and Wix are just so much more user-friendly that people are turning to them. And maybe you want to do that too. There’s no shame in that.

It’s actually the smart move if your goal is to get a professional site up quickly without becoming a part-time web developer. No shame in choosing easier.

E-Commerce? Just Go to Shopify. Seriously.

I’m not going to sugarcoat this one. Just go to Shopify.

If you have an e-commerce platform, just go to Shopify. Don’t even try WordPress. WooCommerce has come a long way but it’s just not there yet. The amount of plugins you need to bolt onto WooCommerce to get it doing what Shopify does out of the box is kind of ridiculous.

Payment processing, inventory management, shipping calculations, tax compliance, Shopify handles all of that natively. With WooCommerce, many of those features are another plugin, another potential security hole, another thing to update and maintain. That stack adds risk.

Shopify does have its own limitations. It uses a proprietary templating language called Liquid, so you’re more locked into their ecosystem. I mean, I guess you could use some Liquid in Shopify to do what you want, but it’s not going to be as open source like a real open source platform is like WordPress.

But for the vast majority of people selling products online, that trade-off is more than worth it. The trade-off is worth it.

So When Should You Actually Use WordPress?

I don’t want this to come off like I’m bashing WordPress, because I’m not. I use it. I like it. I’m not bashing it.

If you’re doing a full-blown blog, I would still consider WordPress because it is so robust for blogging functionalities. I mean, it kind of can’t be beat. The content management system, the SEO capabilities, the flexibility, for pure content creation and publishing, nothing touches it. Nothing touches it for blogging.

And If you know a little bit of code, you can do a lot, especially now with ChatGPT where we can just ask for a PHP snippet of whatever you want or a JavaScript or HTML snippet with CSS of whatever you want and you can create anything.

Some platforms don’t allow you to do all of that. That power is real and it’s unique to open-source platforms like WordPress. You can create anything.

So point being, if you know what you’re doing, maybe you want to go with WordPress. But if you don’t, and you don’t want to learn, maybe you want to skip that. Maybe don’t. And that’s perfectly fine. That’s perfectly fine.

Final Thoughts

Look, WordPress is still an absolute beast for the right person with the right use case. If you’re building a content-heavy blog, know your way around some code (or are willing to lean on ChatGPT for snippets), and don’t mind the ongoing maintenance, it’s genuinely fun and incredibly powerful. I still use it and I’m not stopping. Absolute beast for the right person.

But if you’re a small business owner who just wants a clean site that works, or you’re launching an online store, or you’re someone who’d rather spend time on your actual business than updating 30 plugins every week, give yourself permission to choose something else. Shopify for e-commerce. Squarespace or Wix for simple sites.

That’s not settling. That’s being smart about where you spend your time and energy, and honestly? That’s probably the best business move you can make. Give yourself permission.

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