WordPress was the right answer to a different question.
We build on WordPress and will carry on doing it. But a lot of businesses are running an operational system on a publishing tool, and eventually it shows.
This is not a post about WordPress being bad. We have built substantial things on it and expect to keep doing so. BARC runs twenty-five championships through it with thirty thousand visitors a month. Motorsport UK publishes into it constantly. It is genuinely good at what it is for.
The problem is what it became a default answer to. For roughly fifteen years it was the affordable route to something that felt custom, so an enormous number of businesses ended up on it not because it fitted but because the alternative was a quote they were not going to approve.
How you can tell
The clearest sign is that you are fighting it. A plugin doing structural work it was never meant to do. A page type that is not really a page, it is a business object with an address and a status and a relationship to three other things. Custom fields multiplying to hold data that has nothing to do with publishing.
Another sign is fear. Nobody wants to update anything because the last update broke something, and the dependency chain is now long enough that no single person understands all of it.
A page type that has a status and a relationship to three other things is not a page.
Publishing versus operating
The distinction that matters is whether the thing is publishing content or running an operation. A site that presents information, however much of it, is a publishing problem and WordPress handles that very well.
A system where people log in to do their job, where records have states and move through processes, where two systems need to stay in agreement about the same data, is an operational problem. Solving it inside a publishing tool is possible, and we have seen it done, but you are paying for that decision every time you want to change something.
What we would ask
Whether the CMS is being used to store things that are not content. Whether the number of plugins doing critical work has grown past what anyone could audit. Whether people avoid touching it. Whether the last three change requests all came back more expensive than they sounded.
If most of those are yes, the tool is not the problem so much as the fit. That is a scoping conversation rather than an emergency.
If you take one thing
Count the plugins your site could not function without. If that number is above about five, you do not have a website with some plugins. You have a bespoke system assembled from parts nobody is responsible for, and it is worth knowing that before something breaks.
Three more
worth the time.
How we build has changed considerably in the last couple of years. What it costs has not, and I want to be straight about why that is.
One website on a flat monthly retainer is a reasonable decision. Ten websites on the same flat retainer is somebody else’s business model, and you are funding it.
The instinct when systems stop fitting is to replace all of it. That is usually the most expensive route available and the one most likely to fail halfway.