Douglas "MacDoug" MacDougall

I’ve built sites on Squarespace, on Webflow, on Wix when a client insisted. I’ve set up Gatsby projects and sat next to a client while they stared at a markdown file trying to update their own about page. I keep coming back to WordPress.

This is not a hot take. WordPress powers something like 40% of the web depending on whose stats you’re reading, and there’s a version of this conversation among developers where choosing it is treated as admitting defeat — like you couldn’t be bothered to build something cleaner. I’ve been in those conversations. I disagree.

Here’s the honest version of my position: for most of the clients I work with — small businesses, solo practitioners, the occasional nonprofit — WordPress is correct. Not because it’s the best technology in some abstract sense, but because it’s the technology they’ll actually be able to work with after I’m done.

That matters more than it gets credit for. A beautifully engineered site that requires a developer to update the homepage copy is worse for my clients than a WordPress install with a sensibly configured block editor. The goal is that they can run the thing themselves. WordPress is, more often than not, the path to that outcome.

The parts that are genuinely bad: the plugin ecosystem has a quality distribution problem that requires experience to navigate safely. Security needs real attention — not paranoid attention, but regular attention. The block editor is better than it was two years ago but still produces confusion in spots that are hard to predict in advance. Every WordPress project eventually generates a conversation about whether to update a plugin that hasn’t seen a commit since 2022.

But none of those problems have cleaner solutions elsewhere. They’re just different problems with different shapes on different platforms.

The thing I find myself saying to people starting out in freelance web work: learn the tool your clients will actually use. WordPress isn’t glamorous. But it’s usually still there, working, when you come back two years later to update something. That’s worth something.