Every eighteen months somebody writes the WordPress obituary. Then WordPress goes and runs another chunk of the internet and everybody moves on.
I am not defending it out of loyalty. I have opinions about plenty of it. But when I sit down and think about what actually protects a small business client five years out, it keeps coming out the same way.
The real reason: you can fire me
That is it. That is the whole argument.
If you and I stop working together tomorrow, you own the files, you own the database, you own the domain, and you can hand all of it to any of the thousands of people in Arizona who know WordPress. Nothing breaks. Nothing gets held hostage.
Compare that to the platforms where the design lives inside their editor and the content lives on their servers and the export button gives you a pile of text with none of the layout. You are not a customer there. You are a tenant.
Open source is a hedge, not a religion
Nobody can raise the price of WordPress, because there is no price. Nobody can sunset it, because it is not a product owned by a company that needs a growth number next quarter.
That matters more than people think. I have watched three different platforms in my career change their pricing or their terms and take a bunch of small businesses along for the ride. Those owners did nothing wrong. They just built on rented land.
The honest downside
It needs looking after. Core updates, plugin updates, backups, a place to host it that is not four dollars a month on shared hosting in a data center full of somebody else’s spam.
That is a real cost and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is why care plans exist. Front Porch is 79 a month and that is mostly just somebody watching the thing so it does not rot.
The closed platforms bundle that maintenance into their monthly fee, and honestly for some businesses that trade is fine. If you sell twelve products and you never want to touch it again, go do that. I will tell you so.
What I actually build with
WordPress with a builder I trust, a child theme, and my own PHP where a plugin would be overkill. Every function I write is a file you can read. Every field is documented. No mystery boxes.
Because the goal is not to build something impressive. The goal is to leave the codebase in better shape than I found it, so the next person who opens it does not curse my name.
That next person might be me in four years. Lol. So I have a personal stake in it.