How I changed my mind about WordPress and now use it with a modern approach

I’ve always been surrounded by tech enthusiasts, from high school through university. I’ve always been around people who love to study how the technologies and platforms we use every day work, how to build them, and how to maintain them.

Maybe that’s why I never had a good opinion of WordPress, or in general, of all no-code tools for creating websites. Partly because they “break” that aura of “mystery” behind code for regular people, and partly because most sites created with these platforms are abominations: ugly, messy, and incredibly slow.

At some point, towards the end of high school, to make some money and, more importantly, to put into practice what I knew in a way that was directly applicable and easily usable by everyone, I started creating small websites for friends and friends of friends. I built these sites entirely from scratch, writing all the code myself, initially with plain HTML and CSS, then using Static Site Generation tools (which I still use in certain cases) to manage content. Then, I would set up a headless CMS and connect it to GitHub so that clients could manage the content through a decent graphical interface.

Although this approach was extremely time-consuming and energy-intensive, I had a lot of fun because I could do whatever I wanted, having full access to and control over the code.

But as I got older, the commitments and the time I had for these side projects became less and less, so I started looking for ways to save time and optimize my development process. The only rule was, of course, not to use WordPress or similar drag-and-drop tools, because they were the absolute evil (for me). So, I started watching videos, reading thread after thread on Reddit, and to my surprise, I saw that EVERYONE was using WP, even those who knew how to write code, even those with decades of experience. So I realized that maybe my idea was wrong, and that perhaps there was a way for me to do what I did.

In the end, the projects I was doing were mostly very simple: showcase sites/portfolios/landing pages. During those months, I tried many times to use WordPress to recreate sites I had already made, but I never succeeded and ended up frustrated with interfaces that were too simple and reductive for what I knew and wanted to do. I often found myself up against plugin paywalls for things that I could have done in five minutes with code.

Of course, I knew I could have taken the custom development route by creating the themes I needed, but that didn’t solve my need to optimize development time for those simple sites I was creating. So, I continued with my stack, which, although very slow and cumbersome, worked well and allowed me to do everything I needed (with all the limitations of SSGs).

One day, however, I stumbled upon a Reddit thread that talked exactly about what I was looking for: a WordPress builder that would save me time, be flexible and customizable, generate clean code, but also be developer-friendly. This tool is called Bricks Builder, and it changed the way I work, making me realize that WP, when used in the right way, can be really powerful and flexible.

It took me no time to learn how to use it, and since that day, I’ve been able to do everything I want without having to use countless external plugins and without dealing with stupid interfaces made for people who don’t know how to use a computer.

Today, my stack for showcase sites/blogs/portfolios/landing pages/in general, mostly static simple sites is:

• WordPress
• Bricks Builder
• Advanced Custom Fields (to create custom collections)
• Polylang (for multilingual functionality)
• WooCommerce (to create e-commerce sites without special requirements)

nothing more.

If I need to create more complex things, though, I still go with Next.js with Node or Go as the backend.