I Used WordPress for 20 Years and I Was Wrong

I started building websites on WordPress around 2005. I was also using Joomla at the same time — which, if you've ever used it, explains why WordPress won that particular contest quickly and decisively. For twenty years, WordPress was the answer. Personal sites, corporate sites, everything in between. It had plugins for anything you could imagine, a theme for every aesthetic, and a community that could solve any problem you ran into. For a long time, it genuinely worked. Until it didn't. And it wasn't all at once, not a dramatic failure. It was more like twenty years of paper cuts that finally bled out. The Smart Fridge Problem WordPress carries the weight of everything it can do, whether you need it or not. The admin dashboard is a full application. Login system, user management, media library, plugin architecture, database abstraction, REST API, cron jobs — all of it running on every page load, for every visitor, whether your site needs any of it or not. For most sites — and I mean t