WordPress is Unfit for Purpose in 2024
Times have changed. Have you?
SOME time soon we'll be publishing our 6,000th page since moving to our very own (AGPL-licensed) system at the end of September 2023. We basically abandoned WordPress after we had heavily used it since the very beginning in 2006.
Seeing the latest commentary on Automattic and WordPress’s Matt Mullenweg, namely this piece by Thomas Claburn and another by Christine Hall (who uses WordPress), there's a form of spyware now, set aside back doors that compelled us to ditch WordPress (WordPress used to phone "mother ship" to check for updates; then it just applied updates without asking). Claburn's article says: "According to the WP Engine Tracker website, more than 16,700 sites have left already WPE since September 21 as of the time this article was filed, up from 15,080 on November 6. The site does not say whether anyone has moved in the opposite direction, from Automattic or other hosts to WP Engine or to another content management ecosystem entirely."
We've seen many sites that went static (i.e. away from all the above) and given the tremendous amount of bots on the Web, this makes economic sense. How much of our hosting capacity was wasted running databases for scrapers? How many sites on the Web have already shut down due to such burdens?
There are practical (purely pragmatic) reasons to altogether leave WordPress and similar content management systems. They were probably fit for purpose 20 years ago, but times have changed. The Web itself changed a lot and the majority of Web traffic is pure junk. █