So you want to build a Snowman errr website.
You are like pretty techy, so even though you have heard a million ads for Squarespace or Wix from your favorite YouTuber or podcaster, you decide to go with WordPress. You tell yourself 30 percent of the web runs off WordPress so that is the correct choice.
So you start Googling and you see WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Well, as a techy, obviously you should go with .org. Why would you waste money when you can spin up a VPS for way cheaper? It will be a great learning experience, you tell yourself.
Spins up a VPS and gets WordPress installed. You manage to get into your WordPress dashboard and are ready to look for themes.
Themes
You head over to ThemeForest and start looking through the billions of themes. You find a few with demos you like and rave reviews. You scroll through the list of included paid plugins and think, what a bargain, I get 6,000 dollars of plugins for free. You purchase, add the theme to cart, ignoring the add extended support option. Why would I need extended support, warranties are always scams?
You install the theme and check over the documentation. It tells you to import the demo content. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not, it depends on your hosting provider. For the sake of argument today, it worked! Yay, you tell yourself, this looks amazing, as you go through the front-end of the site.
Backend
You head back to the WordPress dashboard and have 15 new plugins installed just from the demo import. You start fiddling around with the theme to start customizing it. Well, your theme installed a bunch of separate customization options that may or may not override the WordPress customizer. You fiddle around with it for a while and get it working and looking mostly how you want it.
Custimize the Pages
You head towards your pages. You see a page builder strapped on to the WordPress backend (For the sake of my sanity, we will just say Elementor. But feel free to tell me how this is irrelvant due to your favorite builder being the saviour of humanity). You start playing around with the page builder on your homepage and learn that half the elements of the demo theme are hard-coded so you will not be able to recreate anything like it.
You decide, I guess I will learn Elementor, and off to YouTube you go. After fiddling with it for a while, you learn some of the basics of Elementor and have a page you are relatively proud of with a mixture of the demo content and your own edits.
At this point, you have probably run into some sort of problem along the way. No worries, you will just add a plugin to fix it. You end up on some affiliate SEO slop list websites about the best plugin for whatever problem you are trying to fix. You add the plugin that shows up on most of the sites, probably has the highest affiliate revenue share. (It is pretty cool because these sites have usually been SEO slop long before ChatGPT even hit the market, but I digress.)
After many more hours and probably a bunch more page builder template plugins, you have a site you are relatively happy with, at least UI-wise.
SEO
Oh right, I have to do that SEO thing so my page will appear on Google. You go back to (you guessed it) more Listicle sites. You again choose the one that shows up the most. You head over to Reddit to confirm your choice. There is no consensus on Reddit, but you do see people happy with the one you chose, so you just go with it. You set up your SEO to the best of your ability as well, using mostly outdated blog posts and YouTube videos. SEO is the original scam, so you know, we will just pray it worked for now.
Performance
Well, your site is mostly done. You are a techy and hate laggy things, so it is now time to optimize your site's performance. Not to mention the fact that every SEO guru recommends your site load as fast as possible for better rankings.
This should not be so hard, you tell yourself, I am great at optimizing workflows and other things. You check PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom Tools. Wow, your site is slow. You see a whole bunch of issues around caching.
You start browsing list sites and Reddit once again. Everyone and their mom has their preferred affiliate link err caching plugin of choice. You decide to go with whatever one strikes your fancy. You add the plugin, use the defaults, and voilà, your site performance numbers go brrrrr. You see the plugin also has an option for CDN API keys. Oh right, I heard about CDNs before. You search around and everyone says just go with the Cloudflare free plan. So you go and sign up for a Cloudflare account and get that setup.
Everything frontend is broken again due to caching.
All your Elementor animations and site layouts keep breaking so you manually add exceptions. You keep testing and suddenly have 50 browser windows open as you realize a lot of times caches aren't cleared unless you open an incognito. You get it to a somewhat usable state but are still unhappy with your numbers.
The slow descent into madness
You go to Reddit and do every placebo server optimization under the sun with minimal improvement. Performance number is not going up, sadge. You dig deeper into WordPress and everyone starts ranting about how plugins and page builders are killing whatever website they are now managing. So you start removing plugins and adding in custom snippets you have found around the web or your LLM slop gen machine of choice. You get rid of some plugins, you are thrilled. But your performance stays the same.
Build a site with Purpose
It is at this point where everyone tells you have to use base WordPress and build everything custom. At this point, why are you even using WordPress if you are doing everything custom anyway? Now you can actually use a purpose-built framework/SSG/CMS for what you are doing.
Addendum
This is without getting into Matt controversy or Wordpresses 7.0 sloppification.Or the massive security vulnerabilities with the Wordpress plugin architecture .Just in case you wanted to add a few more reasons to avoid. Addendum from the wife: I proofread all his articles before posting. This is THE MOST personal piece he's ever written, professional or otherwise.
Tell me if you vibe with what I'm saying, or tell me why I just need to git good in the comments.
This is day 24 of #100DaysToOffload
