WordPress in 2026: Why I Still Choose It Over Custom CMS (And When I Wouldn't)

I've built products on both sides. Custom CMS from scratch, headless architectures, static site generators, and WordPress. After three years of running a platform that generates WordPress sites programmatically with AI, I have opinions. Strong ones. This isn't a "WordPress is the best" post. It's a breakdown of when WordPress is the right engineering decision, when it's not, and why the answer in 2026 is different from what it was in 2020. The Case Against WordPress (Let's Get This Out of the Way) I'll start with the reasons NOT to choose WordPress, because I think intellectual honesty makes the rest more credible. The database schema is a mess. wp_posts stores pages, posts, attachments, revisions, menu items, and custom post types all in one table. wp_postmeta is an EAV anti-pattern that makes queries slow at scale. If you're building something that needs to handle 500K+ records with complex filtering, you'll fight WordPress every step of the way. The plugin ecosystem is a double-edge