Is WordPress dead? (Or just too stubborn to notice?)

I've been building and maintaining WordPress sites for years. Clients, side projects, quick landing pages — WordPress was always the default answer. Need a website? WordPress. Need a blog? WordPress. Need a portfolio? WordPress with a theme and three plugins. And for a long time, that made sense. WordPress powered a massive share of the web, had a plugin for everything, and you could hand it off to a non-technical client who could update their own content. The ecosystem was unmatched. But lately, every time I spin up a new WordPress instance, I can't shake the feeling that I'm solving a 2026 problem with a 2006 tool. And I don't think I'm alone. The weight problem Let's start with the thing nobody wants to say out loud: WordPress is slow. Not theoretically slow. Not "if you don't optimize it" slow. Slow by default. A fresh WordPress install with a commercial theme and a handful of essential plugins — contact form, SEO, caching, security — already ships more PHP, more database queries,