Driving home from a video shoot last week, crossing the Mississippi back into Missouri, AI podcast playing in the van, and I had the thought I've been dancing around for about six months.
I have built my last WordPress website.
Fifteen years I've been designing on WordPress. Elementor Pro, Divi before that, every page builder in between. I've paid for every plugin you're about to name. I have opinions about Flywheel vs WP Engine that nobody asked for. I am not some Next.js kid who showed up yesterday. I have the receipts on both sides of this fight, and I'm calling it.
Here's what finally broke me
I was building a pricing table for a client. In WordPress, this is a quest. You research plugins. You pay for one. You type every feature into every tier by hand, because of course you do. You publish. It doesn't match the site's fonts. You tweak. The plugin "updates" and breaks the spacing. You tweak again. Half a day gone, and the table looks fine, not great.
Same task in AI-assisted code. I drop the spreadsheet into my agent, say "build this pricing table, match our design system, make it responsive." Done. Clean. Matches. Ships. I could have used the time to actually talk to a customer.
Multiply that across every component of every site you've ever built. The contact form that needs a plugin. The gallery that needs a plugin. The SEO module that needs a plugin that asks you to upgrade every time you log in. The caching plugin to fix the speed problem the other fourteen plugins caused. It's plugins all the way down, and none of them quite talk to each other, and all of them are one update away from nuking your layout.
Mobile. Speed. The things clients actually notice.
Then there's mobile. On WordPress, "making it mobile responsive" means redesigning the entire site in a second view. On the new stack, it's a sentence. "Make it responsive." Done. My clients used to ask me why their site looked weird on their phone. Now they don't, because it doesn't.
And speed. I've got CDN set up. I've got image optimization running. I've got minify plugins. My WordPress sites still load like they're dialing in from a Radio Shack. Clients are noticing. The new product sites I'm building on React Router 7 load instantly, and I didn't have to buy nine plugins to get there.
The math isn't close
Over the last year I've spent $10,000+ learning to build real products with AI coding tools. That's not a casual experiment. That's rent money I bet on a hunch. The hunch was right. The new stack isn't cheaper per se, not on an apples-to-apples build, but when you factor in what I can actually make (custom, fast, not bolted together from six vendors who hate each other), the math isn't close.
The bigger unlock happened inward
For years I tried to find a client portal that integrated with our project management tool that integrated with our invoicing that integrated with our file sharing. Three third-party tools, three logins, three contracts, three companies who don't care if their products work together. I built our new portal into our own site. One login for the client (no password required, actually). Projects, files, proposals, payments, all in one place. I could not have done that in WordPress. Not in a way I'd be proud of.
The honest part, because a rant without a concession is just a tantrum
Learning this from zero is hard. I had 20 years of web experience and it still took me a full year of daily work and $10K to get fluent. If you're a small business owner reading this and thinking "I'll just build my own site with AI this weekend," you're going to have a rough weekend. Knowing what to build, on what stack, with what integrations, with security that doesn't get you sued, is not a prompt. It's a craft. AI didn't kill the craft. It killed the tools.
So here's who this is for
If you're a marketing agency still defaulting every client to WordPress in 2026, look at what you're actually delivering. Slow, plugin-fragile, hard to customize, painful to maintain. There's a better answer now, and your competitors are figuring it out.
If you're a business owner whose site is on WordPress and you've been vaguely told "it's fine, everyone uses it," start asking harder questions. Why is it slow? Why does every small change cost $400? Why does your agency keep having to "update the plugins"?
And if you're another agency founder staring at a WordPress site you've been putting off rebuilding, I see you. I just rebuilt mine. The water's good over here.
The job now
One site, one stack, one login. No plugins. No Jenga. Just the thing your client actually asked for, shipped fast, loading instantly.
That's the job now.