When you work with WordPress long enough, you start to notice the same patterns appearing across very different projects.
A site looks straightforward on the surface. A small business. A clean design. A couple of plugins. Nothing unusual.
Yet the admin feels slow. Updates break things. Features behave unpredictably. And making a small change somehow takes an afternoon.
This is the world I work in every day as a freelance WordPress developer.
Why small sites become surprisingly complex
Most small business sites don’t become messy because someone made a huge mistake.
They become messy because tiny decisions accumulate over time.
A plugin added for a one-off feature.
A theme replaced instead of updated.
A page builder layered on top of an older layout system.
A workaround kept because it “wasn’t worth fixing properly at the time.”
Individually, these choices are harmless.
Together, they create slowdowns, instability, and unexpected behaviour that’s hard to trace.
What “fixing WordPress” usually means in practice
I’m rarely writing complex code.
I’m almost always doing one of these:
- removing things that aren’t needed
- simplifying parts of the setup
- replacing fragile features with more stable ones
- modernising old themes or layouts
- cleaning up years of layered quick fixes
- giving the site a foundation it should have had from the start
Most of the improvements come not from adding more, but from taking things away.
Why this matters for developers (even if you don’t touch WordPress)
Every platform has its own version of this problem.
When you inherit a project:
You’re not just inheriting code.
You’re inheriting years of decisions, trade-offs, deadlines, and “we’ll sort it later.”
Technical debt isn’t always caused by bad engineering.
More often, it’s caused by perfectly reasonable decisions made under imperfect conditions.
Recognising this makes you better at understanding the real cause of instability, in WordPress or anywhere else.
A small reminder for anyone working on legacy projects
If a project feels messy, slow, or fragile, it doesn’t mean the people before you didn’t care.
It usually means the project grew faster than expected.
Or the business needs changed.
Or the original setup was never meant to last this long.
Your job isn’t to judge the past.
It’s to give the project a stable future.
Top comments (4)
I feel you, and despite the fact that I still call WP an open-source success story and I'd even still recommend it for small startups, it's still no pleasure working with from a developer's perspective. And that's just the setup, not talking about hosting, arguing with hosting providers support staff etc. unless you can simply host it on a resource that you 100% control.
Sadly, small business projects don't scale well in most cases.
Concerning a stable future: a clean classic/hybrid WP theme with a small set of proven plugins, no page builder except for the block editor with a restricted set of allowed blocks is the way to go.
The complexity of a WordPress site is not a third party problem. If you want you can write up to date plugins and themse for it.
WordPress just doesn't encourages people to adopt up to date code.
And that is how a simple site becomes complex.
The best example is the new abilities API. While the idea is not bad, the implementation is strait PHP 4 code.
If they used default values (PHP 4), type hinting (PHP 5) there is no need to manually create a description of the callback function. And with attributes (PHP 8) the metadata can be added to the function.
The longer WordPress keeps ignoring language features, the more complex the code will become.
I wonder when people are going to realize that the money they spend on it, can be spend better on other things.
When my project would reach that level of „performance“ I would have the intention to delete it and do a clean recreation. Would be challenging to keep it alive or be motivated to clean up a bunch of crap.
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