WordPress is everywhere. About 43% of the world’s websites use it, if you only include content-managed websites (CMS), that figure rises to a massive 62.7%. For one million websites (the top most popular one million sites) the statistics are still very high – 33%. If you spend an hour browsing the web, you’d be vanishingly unlikely not to hit a website running on the platform.
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What is WordPress?
WordPress is a web-building platform for self-publishing blogs and other websites. It is simple to set up and install. You’re looking at a WordPress page right now. The platform is owned and operated by Automattic Inc.
So How Come WordPress Got So Popular?
It’s Cheap
WordPress is free to use. Like many of the best things on the internet, it’s open source – that is, free to use, develop and work with.
This low cost of entry means that anyone, without a great deal of knowledge, can build a fully functioning, content-managed website.
It’s Been Around a Long Time
WordPress has been in production since 2003 – at the time of its launch, it was very user friendly and easy to use.
This won it early adoption by many users and paved the way for it’s future success.
It’s Adaptable
A powerful theme system means that no two websites need to look the same or even remotely alike. The fact that many websites do is another matter.
The theme system has allowed sites built with WordPress to adapt well to mobile-friendly and then responsive design needs.
There is a vast eco-system of plug-ins out there which extend the functionality of the base platform meaning that if you need more than a simple website, there’s a good probability the solution has already been built and is available for you to use for a small fee.
It’s Popular
Nothing succeeds like success. Its popularity has led to more popularity. Over the decades (decades! on the internet!), the user base has grown so that it has reached an extraordinary critical mass.
This has the following enormous advantages:
Reduced Need for Custom Development
If an integration exists for anything, it’s more than likely to exist for WordPress: 40% of the internet is just too big a slide of the internet to ignore.
For example, all major payment gateways have a fully programmed interface with WooCommerce (the e-commerce plugin). This reduces the skill required, the knowledge required to implement the highly complex process of integrating online payments.
These integrations are provided an updated by the payment providers themselves, again reducing the need for valuable developer time.
Huge Knowledge Base
The community surrounding the platform is lively and active. The internet is full of tutorials and howtos – gaining specific knowledge is relatively straightforward.
The code-base is very well documented. Getting started as a developer is quite a shallow learning curve.
The AI Chatbot indexes have already absorbed this enormous, well-indexed body of knowledge. More than just about anything else, you can ask ChatGPT to write you a bit of WordPress code, there’s a fair chance it will work without much of a fist-fight.
This huge developer base and its relatively generous nature mean that technical requirements, which have emerged as the internet changes, have been met relatively quickly. Rival open source platforms like Joomla and Drupal have struggled to keep up. Some of these rivals may be technically better, but like Betamax video tape before them, the weight of the rival’s popularity has left them far behind.
This popularity is self-perpetuating. Learning WordPress development is rarely a foolish thing to do. In turn, hiring a WordPress developer is rarely hard.
Even 22 years after its first launch, developing your new website still looks like a sensible decision.
The Downsides
Inelegance
WordPress was developed as a blogging platform. Its transition to use as a Content Management System has resulted in some inelegant code solutions and a very inelegant admin interface. More or less everything you need is there but finding it can be a nightmare.
WordPress’s transition to use as an e-commerce platform is even more clunky – piling an e-commerce platform on top of a CMS on top of a blogging platform was never likely to be pain free and, guess what, it isn’t.
There are plenty of sniffy developers out there who‘ll tell you that the underlying programming language, PHP itself, is the root of the problem. Even its most ardent admirers would admit there are tidier languages out there.
Cowboys
PHP flatters you. WordPress flatters you. Both give you enough rope. Without just little knowledge you can create a simple plugin.
But a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. The theme marketplace is littered with ugly themes created with little sense of design and scant knowledge of CSS. The plugin marketplace is full of lazily coded, ill-written plugins. Many are poorly maintained and become insecure over time. Shop for your plugins carefully.
Speed
Inelegant design and messy extensibility can kill performance stone dead.
Out of the box, the platform is pretty speedy. But add a jumble of plugins or a large product manifest (with lots of variants) and it fast grinds to a crawl.
The huge, able developer community have written a vast array of caching and optimisation solutions. It is possible to make a WordPress site run very fast and that matters – but it takes some skill and a lot of clarity of thought.
Security
Because of its popularity, WordPress is a popular target for hackers. Crack one site and, in theory, you have the keys to them all. Keeping the platform secure is an arms-race. If you don’t keep your WordPress installation up-to date you might end up showing your customers this:
Additionally, poorly designed plugins provide a common route for exploiting the system as a whole. If you have a WordPress site and you want to keep your customers’ data safe, you need to keep everything updated. This is a weekly process, if not more so.
Given that the site is such a popular target, your own practices as a website owner need to be up to snuff too. No reused passwords, up to date SSLs – you need team that understands security.
The Upside: Why WordPress Remains King
Despite those flaws, WordPress continues to power over 40% of the entire internet. That doesn’t happen by accident.
For one, its accessibility is unmatched. Business owners, marketers, content creators – people without a shred of coding knowledge – can manage content, update pages, and keep their sites fresh with minimal training. That ease of entry is priceless for anyone wishing to keep their site current.
Then there’s the sheer scale of the ecosystem. Need a shop? WooCommerce has you covered. Want SEO baked in? Plugins like RankMath are industry standards. The community is vast, supportive, and continuously improving. There are plenty of great plugins out there, you just need to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Appearance: High-quality, well-designed themes from reputable developers can dramatically reduce development time while still delivering beautiful, responsive, and professional websites. Pick the right page builder and many of the headaches surrounding changing trends in screen sizes are largely taken care of. WordPress is endlessly extensible – if the design detail you need doesn’t exist, a good developer can create it.
Thanks to its open-source nature, WordPress allows for deep customisation. Whether it’s integrating with third-party APIs, building custom functionality, or tweaking performance at the code level, WordPress can scale to surprisingly complex requirements—if you know what you’re doing.
Little Fire Digital: The WordPress Experts You Need
At Little Fire Digital, we’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of WordPress – and we know how to sidestep the pitfalls.
Unlike many agencies that simply install a bloated theme, slap on a dozen plugins, and cross their fingers, we take a more rigorous, developer-led approach. Our team brings deep PHP expertise to the table, allowing us to write clean, efficient, bespoke code where needed. If we use a plugin, we spend significant time checking it’s appropriate, well coded and secure before it hits your site.
APIs? We love them. Whether it’s integrating with payment gateways, CRMs, custom booking systems, or entirely bespoke platforms, our team thrives on connecting WordPress to the wider digital ecosystem. Complex data integrations, real-time functionality, seamless user experiences – it’s where we shine.
We also understand performance. We implement smart, layered caching, server-side optimisation, and best practices to keep WordPress sites fast, reliable, and scalable. Security is never an afterthought. We harden installs, audit code, and stay on top of the latest vulnerabilities to ensure our clients’ websites remain protected.
The proof is in our portfolio. We’ve built sleek, lightning-fast, reliable WordPress sites for clients across industries—e-commerce shops, corporate platforms, membership sites, and more. Each one tailored, robust, and designed to evolve with your business.
Conclusion: WordPress Done Right
So yes – WordPress again. But when handled by experienced professionals who know its quirks and strengths, WordPress is still one of the most versatile, scalable, and effective platforms available today.
At Little Fire Digital, we take the frustration out of WordPress. We deliver beautifully designed, high-performance, secure websites that don’t just meet expectations – they exceed them.
If you’re tired of battling clunky installs, unreliable plugins, and underwhelming sites, let’s talk. With our expertise, your next WordPress project won’t just be another website – it’ll be a platform you can genuinely rely on, built properly from day one.