When you work with WordPress long enough, you start to notice the same patterns appearing across very different projects.
A site looks straightforward on the surface. A small business. A clean design. A couple of plugins. Nothing unusual.
Yet the admin feels slow. Updates break things. Features behave unpredictably. And making a small change somehow takes an afternoon.
This is the world I work in every day as a freelance WordPress developer.
Why small sites become surprisingly complex
Most small business sites don’t become messy because someone made a huge mistake.
They become messy because tiny decisions accumulate over time.
A plugin added for a one-off feature.
A theme replaced instead of updated.
A page builder layered on top of an older layout system.
A workaround kept because it “wasn’t worth fixing properly at the time.”
Individually, these choices are harmless.
Together, they create slowdowns, instability, and unexpected behaviour that’s hard to trace.
What “fixing WordPress” usually means in practice
I’m rarely writing complex code.
I’m almost always doing one of these:
- removing things that aren’t needed
- simplifying parts of the setup
- replacing fragile features with more stable ones
- modernising old themes or layouts
- cleaning up years of layered quick fixes
- giving the site a foundation it should have had from the start
Most of the improvements come not from adding more, but from taking things away.
Why this matters for developers (even if you don’t touch WordPress)
Every platform has its own version of this problem.
When you inherit a project:
You’re not just inheriting code.
You’re inheriting years of decisions, trade-offs, deadlines, and “we’ll sort it later.”
Technical debt isn’t always caused by bad engineering.
More often, it’s caused by perfectly reasonable decisions made under imperfect conditions.
Recognising this makes you better at understanding the real cause of instability, in WordPress or anywhere else.
A small reminder for anyone working on legacy projects
If a project feels messy, slow, or fragile, it doesn’t mean the people before you didn’t care.
It usually means the project grew faster than expected.
Or the business needs changed.
Or the original setup was never meant to last this long.
Your job isn’t to judge the past.
It’s to give the project a stable future.
Top comments (1)
I feel you, and despite the fact that I still call WP an open-source success story and I'd even still recommend it for small startups, it's still no pleasure working with from a developer's perspective. And that's just the setup, not talking about hosting, arguing with hosting providers support staff etc. unless you can simply host it on a resource that you 100% control.
Sadly, small business projects don't scale well in most cases.
Concerning a stable future: a clean classic/hybrid WP theme with a small set of proven plugins, no page builder except for the block editor with a restricted set of allowed blocks is the way to go.