WordPress powers roughly 40% of the internet. It's the default. The safe pick. The thing your last agency probably built your site on. So when we tell people we don't use it, the first question is always the same: why not?

The honest answer is that WordPress was built for a different era of the web. And for the businesses we work with - small companies that need speed, reliability, and a site that actually drives growth - there are better options now.

This isn't a hit piece. WordPress got a lot of people online. But after years of building and inheriting WordPress sites, we made a deliberate decision to move away from it. Here's the thinking behind that.

The Speed Problem Is Real

Every WordPress site we've ever touched has the same issue: it's slow. Not always unusably slow - but slow enough to matter. Slow enough that Google notices. Slow enough that a visitor bouncing after 3 seconds costs you a lead you'll never know about.

The reason is structural. WordPress loads a full server-side stack on every page request. Add a theme, a page builder, a handful of plugins for forms, SEO, security, analytics, and caching - and suddenly your homepage is making 80+ HTTP requests and loading 3MB of assets just to show some text and a hero image.

Modern frameworks solve this differently. A Next.js site pre-renders pages at build time and serves them from a CDN. The result is a site that loads in under a second - not because you bolted on a caching plugin, but because the architecture is fundamentally faster.

Plugins Are a Liability

The WordPress plugin ecosystem is both its greatest strength and its biggest problem. Need a contact form? Plugin. Need SEO tools? Plugin. Need your site to not get hacked? Plugin.

Every plugin is a dependency you don't control. Each one is maintained (or abandoned) by a different developer. Each one adds weight, potential conflicts, and security surface area. We've seen sites running 30+ plugins where half of them haven't been updated in over a year.

The common issues we've seen from plugin-heavy WordPress sites:

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• Sites breaking after a routine update

• Security vulnerabilities from outdated or abandoned plugins

• Plugin conflicts causing forms to stop working or pages to break

• Performance degradation as plugins stack up

• Monthly maintenance costs just to keep things from falling apart

With a custom build, the functionality is built into the codebase. There's no plugin layer to manage, no third-party code you're hoping stays maintained. It just works.

Security Shouldn't Be an Afterthought

WordPress is the most targeted CMS on the internet. That's not an opinion - it's a function of market share. When 40% of sites run the same software, attackers build automated tools to exploit it at scale.

Brute force login attempts, SQL injection through plugins, outdated PHP versions, compromised themes - these aren't edge cases. They're Tuesday. And the fix is usually another plugin (a security plugin to protect you from your other plugins).

A static or server-rendered site built on modern frameworks has a fundamentally smaller attack surface. There's no admin login page to brute force. No database exposed to the internet. No PHP execution layer to exploit. The architecture itself is the security model.

You Can Still Edit Your Own Content

This is the objection we hear most: "But my team needs to update content without calling a developer." Fair. And the answer isn't WordPress - it's a headless CMS.

We use Sanity.io as our content management layer. It gives you a clean, intuitive editing interface for your content - text, images, blog posts, whatever you need to manage. But unlike WordPress, the CMS is completely decoupled from the frontend. Your editors get a simple dashboard. Your site gets a fast, custom-built frontend. Neither one can break the other.

What that means in practice:

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• Your team edits content in a clean dashboard - no code, no risk of breaking the site

• No plugin updates, no security patches, no maintenance overhead

• Content is delivered via API, so the same content can power your website, app, or automations

• The editing experience is actually better than WordPress - purpose-built for your content, not bloated with options you don't need

And because Tuscan CMS is API-first, it plugs directly into the content automation systems we build. The same pipeline that generates a blog post can publish it straight to your site without anyone logging into a dashboard.

What We Build Instead

We started on Framer - a modern web platform that let us ship fast, well-designed sites without the WordPress baggage. Framer gave our clients dramatically better performance, cleaner design, and zero maintenance headaches.

Now we're going further. We're building fully custom sites using Next.js - the same framework powering sites for companies like Nike, Twitch, and Notion. These are sites that are fast by default, SEO-optimized at the architecture level, and built to scale with your business.

The stack we use now:

• Next.js for the frontend - server-rendered, static where possible, deployed on Vercel's edge network

• Tuscan CMS for content management - headless CMS with a clean editing experience

• Tailwind CSS for design - custom, responsive, no bloated theme layer

• Vercel for hosting - global CDN, automatic deployments, near-zero downtime

A small business doesn't need less than WordPress - it needs something better and simpler. A site that loads fast, ranks well, stays secure, and lets you focus on running your business instead of managing your website.

The Real Cost of WordPress

WordPress is often pitched as the affordable option. And upfront, it can be. But the total cost of ownership tells a different story.

Hosting: WordPress needs server-side hosting. Cheap shared hosting is slow and insecure. Managed WordPress hosting that's actually good runs $30-100+/month. A static Next.js site on Vercel? Free tier covers most small business sites.

Maintenance: Plugin updates, WordPress core updates, PHP version management, security monitoring, backups. Either you're paying an agency a monthly retainer or you're doing it yourself and hoping nothing breaks.

Performance fixes: Caching plugins, image optimization plugins, CDN configuration - all to solve problems that don't exist on a modern stack.

Security: When (not if) something goes wrong, the cost of cleanup, lost traffic, and damaged trust adds up fast.

A custom-built site costs more upfront. We're transparent about that. But the ongoing cost is near zero - no maintenance retainers, no plugin subscriptions, no emergency fixes at 11pm on a Friday.

Who WordPress Still Works For

We're not saying WordPress is wrong for everyone. If you're running a personal blog and want to set something up in an afternoon, WordPress is fine. If you have an existing WordPress site with complex integrations and years of content, a migration might not make sense right now.

But if you're a business investing in a new website - something that needs to perform, convert, and represent your brand - we think you deserve better than a platform that requires 15 plugins to do what modern tools do out of the box.

Where We Stand

We moved away from WordPress because our clients deserve sites that are fast, secure, and low-maintenance by default - not by plugin. The web has better tools now, and we think every business should benefit from them.

If you're feeling stuck with a slow, clunky site that costs too much to maintain, that's not just a WordPress problem - it's a signal that you've outgrown it. And there's a better path forward.