The Great Wordpress Purge
Written: , Revised:
I created this website in 2020 using Wordpress. In 2023, I became so frustrated and annoyed by Wordpress that I deleted everything hosted here and went back to hand-hacking HTML.
This is an insane thing to do, so I figured it would make an amusing story.
I put my first website together in 1992. In early 1993, I was hired by a company to help build their website. In late 1993, I finished that job and was hired by another company to help build their website, build websites for their clients, and assist in sysadmin and tech support duties.
This was all back when creating a website meant firing up a text editor and writing all of the code by hand. This was the time when the only way to do things like sidebar navigation meant abusing tables. This is back when testing your website meant checking that it worked in both Netscape and NCSA Mosaic.
Those were interesting times.
Fast forward about ten years, and suddenly we get this glorious new technology called Content Management Systems (CMS). A CMS is basically a set of server-side scripts attached to a database. The database contains all of the content for the site, the scripts format and serve that content up on demand.
To create a web site today, you can install a CMS, connect to an "admin" area, and put in your content. The CMS takes care of all of the HTML, CSS, and Javascript for you. Even the earliest and most primitive CMS packages could save web developers uncountable hours and headaches.
That's a good thing.
In theory.
In practice, Content Management Systems have became pretty goddamned terrible.
Even the simplest CMS today relies on an ever-growing list of scripting languages, frameworks, libraries, package managers, themes, and plug-ins. They've become enormously complex balls of code which are inscrutable even to the people maintaining them.
That's a bad thing. You know, assuming you value little things like security and privacy.
Known vulnerabilities and exploits abound in modern CMS systems. Some of the most popular ones average at least one high-severity bug per month.
As for privacy? A lot of these systems, themes, and plug-ins insist on phoning home to their developers with every request. They constantly collect data from your users. The privacy implications of running these packages has become so tragi-comically awful that there are now plug-ins to automatically build privacy policies based on all of the other plug-ins you have installed.
Let me say that again: Modern content management software is so obtuse and privacy-violating that we now need other software to analyze it and tell us how bad it is.
And yes, all of this applies to Wordpress. It's applied to Wordpress for years, but somewhere between 2023 and 2024 the situation became unacceptable to me.
As of 2023, I'd used Wordpress for about a decade, which is almost the entire time that Wordpress had been around. I've never loved it, but I was used to it, and it made things simpler.
But it got to the point where even with my bare-minimum needs, I had to have seven different plug-ins installed. Every single one of these plug-ins would phone home with every request. Half of these plug-ins wouldn't stop trying to up-sell me on paid subscriptions every time I logged in. And every single day I had to update at least one (usually more) because "Oh no! Someone found another vulnerability!"
In 2023, in between all of the tracking and the complexity and the total lack of security, I just...broke. I wiped my web site and started it from scratch, using barebones HTML and CSS.
And in 2024, two things occurred in the Wordpress space that reaffirmed this decision.
First, Automattic, the company behind Wordpress, went all in on the planet-destroying plagiarism machinery that is LLMs.
And second, there was some...drama in the Wordpress community which destroyed any and all remaining good will I felt toward the company.
Either one of these things would cause me to side-eye a product. Given both of them? I can't ever trust Wordpress or the people managing it again.