Exploring options outside of WordPress

For over 13 years WordPress has been my default answer. New project comes in, the conversation starts with WordPress, and the conversation usually ends with WordPress. I’ve written about keeping client sites updated, patching exploits and shepherding dozens of installs through every major release. What the WordPress community has built is genuinely incredible, and having all of my client projects on one platform was fantastic for maintainability. Tools like ManageWP meant every site, every plugin update, every backup sat behind a single dashboard. One place to look, one place to update.

The AI wrinkle

But something has shifted over the last year or two. As AI coding tools march forward I find myself writing less code by hand, and I find myself moving much faster outside the confines of WordPress. That’s not a knock on WordPress, it’s just what happens to a 20-plus year old behemoth. There’s a lot of PHP, a lot of legacy patterns, a lot of strings attached to a lot of hooks, and it has moved slower with AI tool adoption than the modern JS ecosystem has. I just haven’t found convenient AI coding workflows that fit WordPress the way they fit a fresh Astro or TanStack project. When you can hand an agent a codebase that contains everything the experience working on it is night and day.

The question I now ask

So as I take on new projects I’m really asking myself whether WordPress is still the right fit, or whether Astro, TanStack, or any of the other myriad of JS based solutions can take its place. I do worry about long term maintainability, especially where I’m the only developer that knows the project. That fear kept me on WordPress for a long time. A decade from now, who picks up the pieces if I built something bespoke? But I can also see the writing on the wall: if you have a modern coding agent and a codebase that it can read, just about any project maintenance task is just a short prompt away. The bus factor matters less when an agent can read the entire repo in one sitting.

The proof is this site

The example is the site you’re reading right now. I’ve just moved it to Astro. It’s my personal site and it doesn’t need most of what WordPress provides. No user roles, no plugin ecosystem, no database. It’s been a freeing experience to have the entire site in a single git repo with markdown based blog content. Writing a post is now committing a file. Redesigning a page is a branch and a prompt. There’s no admin dashboard to log into, because the whole thing is just text I own.

So, is WordPress over?

Not even close. I’ll still use WordPress and I’m in no hurry to migrate the 75 websites I manage away from it. Those sites work, they make money for their owners, and there’s no rewrite fairy paying for that exercise. But it’s no longer the first and only tool I reach for. It’s one option in the toolbox now, and for the first time in 13 years, it has to argue its case like everyone else.