Why I Stopped Using WordPress After 6 Years. It's Not About the Tech.

I need to say something that's been building for over a year now. I stopped using WordPress.

Not because I found something shinier. Not because some influencer told me headless is the future. I stopped because I lost trust in the platform I built my entire career on.

This is going to be a long one. And it's going to be uncomfortable. WordPress gave me everything. My first clients, my first revenue, my first real confidence as a developer. Walking away from it feels like leaving home. But some homes become places you can't stay in anymore.

I Built My Entire Career on WordPress

Six years. Over a hundred client websites. WordPress was the answer to everything.

Client needs a blog? WordPress. E-commerce? WooCommerce. Portfolio site? WordPress with a page builder. Landing page? WordPress. Complex booking system? WordPress with three plugins stacked on top of each other and a prayer.

A big chunk of those 100+ sites came through my six years on Fiverr, where WordPress was the default answer to every brief. I spent years comparing WordPress page builders trying to find the right workflow. Elementor, Oxygen, Bricks, LiveCanvas. I went deep.

WordPress gave me my start. I owe it a lot. That's exactly why this post is hard to write.

Then Matt Mullenweg Called WP Engine a Cancer

In September 2024, Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, published a blog post calling WP Engine "a cancer to WordPress."

What followed was one of the most damaging sequences of events in open-source history.

First, the "alignment offer." Mullenweg gave Automattic employees a choice: agree with his direction or take a severance package. 159 people walked. That's 8.4% of the company. Not junior hires. The head of WordPress.com. The head of contributor experience. The principal AI architect. People who had built the platform.

Then came the ACF takeover. In October 2024, WordPress.org seized control of Advanced Custom Fields, a plugin installed on millions of sites. They renamed it "Secure Custom Fields" and auto-updated it across every WordPress installation. Without consent. Without warning. The ACF team called it what it was: a supply chain attack.

Think about that. One person controls WordPress.org, the plugin repository, the update mechanism, the trademarks. And he was willing to use all of that power for what amounts to a personal vendetta against a hosting company.

A court granted WP Engine a preliminary injunction in December 2024. The litigation is still ongoing as of 2026. Josh Collinsworth wrote what many of us were thinking: "If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed."

I don't know if WordPress will survive this in the long run. But I know it changed how I think about building on a platform controlled by a single person.

The Problems WordPress Has Refused to Fix for Years

The Mullenweg drama would have been easier to stomach if the platform itself was in good shape. It's not.

Security is a disaster. Patchstack reported 106 new plugin vulnerabilities in a single week in 2025. A single week. And more than half of the developers who received vulnerability reports didn't patch before public disclosure. That means millions of sites running known vulnerable code because nobody bothered to update.

Gutenberg was forced on the community. The block editor was supposed to be the future. Instead, Classic Editor has 9 million+ downloads, which is basically a protest vote from developers who don't want it. I've talked to dozens of developers who feel the same way: Gutenberg solved a problem most of us didn't have.

Plugin bloat is out of control. No real coding standards. Overlapping functionality. Abandoned plugins sitting on thousands of production sites. I even reviewed Bricks Builder as a promising alternative within WordPress, but even the best builders can't fix what's broken underneath.

The update treadmill never stops. Updating WordPress core, your theme, and 20+ plugins monthly is practically a full-time job. And every update is a roll of the dice. Will this one break something? Will two plugins conflict? You never know until it's too late.

Instead of addressing any of this, WordPress 7 decided to chase shiny objects.

WordPress 7 and the Shiny Object Problem

WordPress 7.0 dropped in April 2026. The headline features? An Abilities API, an MCP Adapter, and a WP AI Client baked into core.

AI in WordPress core. While the plugin security situation is a dumpster fire. While Gutenberg still frustrates half the developer community. While the governance crisis remains completely unresolved.

This is a pattern. Automattic prioritizes features that serve its commercial interests: Jetpack bundling, WordPress.com upsells, and now AI features that will inevitably tie back to Automattic's products. Meanwhile, the community problems that actually matter get ignored.

After what happened with ACF, who trusts that AI features in core won't serve Automattic first and the community second?

The market is noticing. WordPress active domains dropped from 5.8 million to 4.67 million, a 19% decline and the first sustained contraction in 20 years. Market share dipped from 43.6% to 42.6%. Not a collapse, but a trend. Meanwhile, Wix grew 32.6% year over year. Competitors are eating WordPress's lunch while WordPress argues with itself.

What I Actually Switched To (And Why It's Not Perfect)

Here's my current stack: Next.js for the frontend and Directus as a headless CMS. I self-host on Coolify with Hetzner servers.

The switch wasn't painless. I wrote about how my Next.js build was killing my server when I was figuring out the self-hosting setup. There were nights where I genuinely missed the simplicity of clicking "Install" on a WordPress plugin.

But here's what I gained: speed, control, and peace of mind. No plugin vulnerabilities keeping me up at night. No update roulette. No wondering whether one person's mood will break my entire workflow.

I've also been experimenting with Astro, and I love it. For static websites, it's incredible. The build output is clean, the developer experience is fantastic, and it doesn't ship unnecessary JavaScript to the browser. If a client needs a marketing site or a blog that doesn't require server-side rendering, Astro is my first pick now.

And Cloudflare. Their Pages and Workers platform with that free tier? Amazing. The edge network, the performance, the zero-config SSL. For deploying static sites and serverless functions, it's hard to beat. I've been using it more and more.

Here's the thing though: I'm not married to any of this. Next.js and Directus are what's in my toolbox right now. That can change anytime. That's actually the point. When you decouple your frontend from your CMS, when you own your hosting, when your content lives in a database you control, switching tools becomes a Tuesday afternoon project instead of a six-month migration nightmare.

I want to be honest about the tradeoffs. This stack has a steeper learning curve. There's no plugin ecosystem. You build everything yourself. It's not right for every client, and I wouldn't recommend it to someone who's never touched a terminal. But for me, right now, it's the right call.

As I wrote in The Tailor Who Can't Sew His Own Pants, the irony of building sites for clients while constantly rethinking your own tools isn't lost on me. I'm still figuring it out. But at least I'm figuring it out on my own terms.

The Uncomfortable Truth: WordPress Is Still Right for Many People

I want to be careful here. This isn't an "everyone should leave WordPress" post.

42.6% of the web still runs on WordPress. For simple blogs, small business sites, non-technical users who need to update their own content without calling a developer, it's still the most accessible option out there. The plugin ecosystem, despite all its flaws, is unmatched. Nothing else gives a non-coder that much power that quickly.

If a client comes to me tomorrow and says "I need a simple site, I want to manage it myself, and my budget is $3,000," I might still recommend WordPress. Context matters more than ideology.

But for me? After watching the Mullenweg drama unfold, after years of fighting the update treadmill, after seeing the platform prioritize AI features over security and governance, I couldn't stay.

WordPress didn't lose me because of technology. It lost me because of values. Because one person had too much power and used it recklessly. Because the community I believed in didn't have the governance structures to stop it. Because the platform I trusted with my clients' businesses showed me it wasn't trustworthy anymore.

I don't know what happens next for WordPress. Maybe it reforms. Maybe a fork takes over. Maybe it continues its slow decline while Wix and Squarespace chip away at the edges.

What I do know is that I sleep better now. My sites are faster. My clients' data is in databases I control. And nobody can auto-update my tools because they're having a bad week.

That's enough for me.

If you're a developer or business owner rethinking your web stack, or if you're stuck on WordPress and wondering whether the grass is greener, let's talk. I've been on both sides. The answer isn't always obvious, but the conversation is worth having.