Every time there’s a WP post on HN, there’s the inevitable haters. The ones who say things like “just setup a static site with a CI pipeline”. The understanding of audience here is pretty bad. Your average business owner wants to focus on the important thing: their content. They want to type in a box and push publish. End. They don’t care about how crap (or not) the code is. They don’t care about performance too much. They do want to have the extensibility that is offered. They don’t want to get locked in (cough, Wix, Squarespace).

The thing is, of course you can fk this up. Install Wordpress on crap hosting, install 100 plugins, fail to keep them updated - things are going to go badly. But now think about what happens if you do the same with literally any bit of software, even the hip jamstack stuff doing the rounds right now.

There is good. There is bad. There are people who claim they “do Wordpress” when in fact they can just install plugins and a builder theme. There are people who do it well, with good deployment, repo management, backups, updates.

But the end thing is always the same. Your site owners / editors just want something flexible where they can make content changes. They want familiar. They want flexible.

There are times when Wordpress is the wrong solution. There are bad ways of doing it. But, really, you can’t argue with 40% of the web.