WordPress in Year Two: What I Still Use It For

Everyone in my ecosystem predicted WordPress would die by 2025. It did not. I still maintain three WordPress sites in year two and the reasons keep compounding. The stack choice is rarely about what is newest. It is about what the client can live with in year three when you are gone.

Where WordPress Still Wins

• Content-heavy sites the client edits weekly
• Sites that need a plugin for a specific business function
• Clients with an existing WordPress workflow they will not abandon
• Projects where the ongoing maintenance budget is near zero

For each of these, reaching for Next.js is fighting the client. WordPress already solved their problem.

Where I Still Move Away From It

• Headless front ends where the client does not touch content
• Sites that need custom business logic more than custom content
• Anything that needs to integrate with a modern API stack

The split is cleaner than the blog discourse suggests. WordPress is excellent at one thing and mediocre at everything else. Using it for the one thing is fine.

The Plugin Discipline

I enforce a strict plugin budget: under ten plugins, every one justified, every one updated monthly. The death spiral of WordPress sites is plugin sprawl, not WordPress itself. A well tended ten-plugin site runs for years without drama.

The Hosting Choice

Shared hosting is fine for small sites. Managed WordPress hosting pays for itself above about ten thousand monthly visitors or when compliance matters. Self-hosted on a VPS is almost never the right answer now: the DevOps burden eats the savings.

The Backup Ritual

Weekly offsite backups, monthly restore test. Not reviewing your backups is pretending they exist. I have seen three clients realize on a Friday afternoon that their backups had been silently failing for six months. Monthly restore tests catch this.

The Client Handoff

Most of my WordPress work ends with a handoff to the client or their internal team. The handoff document I write is boring and important: admin credentials, plugin list with purpose, backup location, hosting contact, update cadence. Ten pages that save the next person a month of archaeology.

What I Tell Skeptics

Use the right tool for the project, not the right tool for your portfolio. A working WordPress site the client can edit is a better outcome than a beautiful Next.js site the client cannot.

The official WordPress documentation remains the best reference for plugin and theme conventions.