90 engineers on Hacker News describe using WordPress first-hand: 13 endorse it, 20 regret it, 9 are mixed.
“20+ plugins creating a security nightmare.”
regret · production · torm · 2026-04-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Wordpress specifically ended up in no man's land for us. Not powerful enough for big sites... too big of a pain for ephemeral microsites.”
regret · production · snowwrestler · 2026-04-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“fix a whole slew of Wordpress-isms in the Markdown it produced and convert Wordpress image references to inline functions.”
regret · personal · nunez · 2025-09-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The plugin system is pretty amazing... It's not perfect but its easy to use... We switched our non profit to using it”
mixed · production · acomjean · 2025-01-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Dude I have been using WP since the fork from B2 decades ago.”
endorse · personal · whalesalad · 2024-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“yeah, we switched to WordPress. I am glad we didn't follow up on our web agency 5 years ago to switch to gasby. Our wordpress is still running fine.”
endorse · production · johnchristopher · 2024-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We are now actively researching WordPress alternatives for the two dozen or so client sites we run on WordPress and WPEngine.”
regret · production · bigiain · 2024-10-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I used to work at a shop that used WP and it was a huge force multiplier.”
endorse · production · busterarm · 2024-09-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We have a hybrid wordpress symfony site... we like that we switched to wordpress for the more static parts of the site (CMS).”
endorse · production · acomjean · 2024-08-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We migrated from WordPress to Prismic several years ago, then migrated to Strapi a year ago, and it has been miserable.”
regret · production · ianhawes · 2024-06-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It was a great day when we replaced Wordpress, because I was no longer on the hook to spend a day updating that with no notice.”
regret · production · toast0 · 2024-04-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We moved to Wordpress and have setup a vetting process for plugins which they just need 2-3. ... As an engineer everything about it is annoying”
mixed · production · abhiyerra · 2024-03-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been very happily using Woocommerce on Wordpress, basically nothing but the hosting cost for Wordpress”
endorse · production · mtlynch · 2024-02-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We moved to Wordpress/Woocommerce and have never regretted it for a second.”
endorse · production · WhackyIdeas · 2023-07-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I too was a junior that was plagued by wordpress and php custom plugins, never again will I touch this language if I can.”
regret · production · fHr · 2023-05-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I use Wordpress daily, and my company uses it - but it's hosted, not a self-run thing.”
endorse · production · MR4D · 2023-04-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have a particularly nasty database schema (thanks, wordpress) to deal with”
regret · production · larve · 2022-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“An old friend wanted help with wordpress (I hate wordpress), but had to take it.”
regret · production · gremlinsinc · 2020-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“what's frustrating with Wordpress is that there are many plugins to do caching, and each caching plugin has a million options in it”
regret · production · darsoli · 2020-10-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We self-hosted dozens of WP sites for years. It definitely requires careful attention to keep it secure and performant.”
mixed · production · snowwrestler · 2020-10-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using the same WordPress installation for seven years now... Does what I need it to, works for the amount of traffic I get”
endorse · personal · 7 yr · egypturnash · 2019-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've been using WordPress which isn't terrible but I'm just wondering what the options are.”
mixed · production · jdironman · 2018-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have definitely spent less time working around its shortcoming than fiddling with WordPress and managing the whole LAMP”
regret · personal · alxlaz · 2017-11-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have been using WordPress for my personal blog and such task is trivial in WordPress with built-in sharing feature.”
endorse · personal · paradite · 2017-11-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The frontend is WordPress (in need of a makeover) while I wrote the backend in Rails since no plugin could replicate the functionalities I needed.”
mixed · personal · 7 yr · acangiano · 2017-11-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I recently had a case of a WP site hacked for ransomware. This was a tiny 10-pages site (obviously a non-patched WP version).”
regret · production · bikamonki · 2016-05-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The platform wasn't maintained, Wordpress wasn't maintained, when I came in years later, I found a mess that wasn't even worth maintaining anymore.”
regret · production · vinceguidry · 2016-01-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“That was something I found aggravating that was never really addressed at the company I worked at. ... That wasn't my experience. We separated functional features into separate plugins”
mixed · production · PopeOfNope · 2015-11-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The WordPress UI hasn't changed in the 6 years that I've been using it. Everything about it feels "heavy".”
regret · personal · 6 yr · puranjay · 2015-07-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we moved off of wordpress precisely because it was written in php. Once you're trying to do anything reasonably complex in a CMS”
regret · production · m0th87 · 2015-05-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it never really caused us any concerns about security, nor has it ever really posed a problem.”
endorse · production · PebblesHD · 2015-04-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we had a really bad experience with wordpress and are so glad we switched.”
regret · production · dobe · 2015-01-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use Wordpress to allow our client to easily create beautiful things. The newest update to Wordpress is also quite beautiful.”
endorse · production · jcutrell · 2013-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“how disgusting it is to move a WordPress website from one place to another”
regret · personal · omegote · 2013-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“This is my primary new WP project approach... The main problem I run into is with the symlink'd wp-content directory. WP seems to not interpret it well”
mixed · production · mikegirouard · 2013-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we dont have to struggle with Sharepoint or Wordpress or any other nonsense”
regret · production · foz · 2013-11-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My biggest complaint about Wordpress when I first had to mess around with the codebase last year is that it is an exercise in masochism.”
regret · production · 1 yr · malandrew · 2013-09-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“even "solid" WP code is. ... it is pretty functional compared to say, Joomla”
mixed · production · homosaur · 2013-03-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Though keeping wordpress alive is hard. That's why we moved to WPEngine for blog hosting instead of doing it ourselves.”
regret · production · yesimahuman · 2012-10-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run a WordPress instance just as a CMS... It's clunky, but there's no reason to reinvent an editing interface.”
mixed · production · kevinpet · 2012-03-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I always use either a framework or a CMS that's a framework, like Wordpress with Thematic.”
endorse · production · michaeldhopkins · 2011-09-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using wordpress on http://puremango.co.uk for a year and a half with no major complaints. It's easy to set up and modify”
endorse · personal · 1.5 yr · user24 · 2010-12-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“This doesn't work reliably enough for WP sites.”
neutral · production · thaumaturgy · 2025-09-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was able to rebuild the WordPress site on nearlyfreespeech.net and run it for less then $5 a month”
neutral · personal · jareds · 2025-04-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we moved to Webflow at my company, used to be on Wordpress, and before that used to have a Markdown-compiled site”
neutral · production · cj · 2024-10-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was tasked with automating popular software installs into fresh VMs. I think some of my scripts for doing so are on my github - wordpress and some dashboard software”
neutral · production · genewitch · 2024-08-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I do have huckridge.com (a Wordpress site)”
neutral · production · LarryClapp · 2023-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we unfortunately run WordPress, and I don't have time to manually audit all of the stupid plugins people want to be installed”
neutral · production · tehalex · 2023-11-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We used to do this with PHP WordPress templates, then we moved to Nuxt server side rendered on Node (Heroku).”
neutral · production · drewrbaker · 2023-07-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“These are the reasons we switched to self-hosted Wordpress in the beginning.”
neutral · production · WhackyIdeas · 2023-07-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“doing it on WordPress and Discourse for now but it can work for other sites”
neutral · personal · jimkleiber · 2022-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“nobody got fired for buying IBM, Microsoft or Wordpress when asked why we use wordpress @work.”
neutral · production · johnchristopher · 2022-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The community (of about 50) that we moved to the platform died pretty fast and the bans are still in place.”
neutral · personal · 6510 · 2022-04-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“That's how I dumped my wordpress to HTML. I regretted it.”
neutral · personal · steren · 2021-01-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“A WordPress website with Jetpack search is surprisingly good — we use something like that at Automattic.”
neutral · production · noahtallen · 2020-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use AWS for some services as well so it is a specific part of the workload we run (not just WP)”
neutral · production · Patrick-STH · 2020-12-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“beta tested WordPress even before it was able to do multiple pages.”
neutral · personal · Brajeshwar · 2020-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“refetch all of our WordPress CMS media library each time, sometimes it would just crash during build.”
neutral · production · himynameistimli · 2020-10-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“a small network of sites, around 130 or so (Wordpress)”
neutral · production · searcheye · 2020-03-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“for blog part + search with algolia”
neutral · personal · agustif · 2019-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using branchci (free tier) recently to build, lint, and deploy a wp site”
neutral · production · agustif · 2019-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“If I just wanted a self-hosted platform to track events, I have a wordpress plugin for that already.”
neutral · personal · joecot · 2019-10-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we pick and choose the right platform for the job, between Laravel/MODX/Wordpress/Magento/etc.”
neutral · production · markwillis82 · 2019-03-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“migrated to a static WordPress site with a handful of Angular Elements”
neutral · production · buu700 · 2019-02-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Since Jetpack code is also what we run on WP.com (tens of billions of pageviews)”
neutral · production · photomatt · 2018-12-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use a WordPress website with a plugin to make it into a knowlegebase wiki.”
neutral · production · jkjustinkumar · 2018-05-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“keep hosting some Wordpress blogs on URLs nested within the .NET infrastructure”
neutral · production · Frondo · 2016-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run a news site that gets about 500K uniques a month off a $20 instance on Digital Ocean this way.”
neutral · production · jawngee · 2016-11-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“an enterprise WordPress agency, and we run all our sites”
neutral · production · rmccue · 2016-11-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“When you have a dev and production versions of your Wordpress sites it's become super useful.”
neutral · personal · patforg · 2014-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Wordpress for our Blog but it's completely separated from our main website.”
neutral · production · greenwalls · 2014-12-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Integration wise we have built code to integrate with WordPress, Twitter and Facebook.”
neutral · production · aespinoza · 2014-11-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run the largest Wordpress website out there, and decided to rewrite commenting inhouse. It's been... hard.”
neutral · production · brokentone · 2014-04-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was pulling in blog data from wordpress on every page load to integrate into the CRM”
neutral · production · 0.5 yr · gremlinsinc · 2014-01-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have done WordPress themes off good, clean PSD's only in less than 8 hours.”
neutral · production · IgorPartola · 2014-01-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using a similar setup with Pomander and the Pomander-Wordpress plugin.”
neutral · production · 1 yr · Eclyps · 2013-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“databases are always tied together. (This is for Wordpress purposes).”
neutral · production · antjanus · 2013-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Other than delivering a standard website with Wordpress/Drupal as your solution”
neutral · production · acesubido · 2013-11-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I don't work with WordPress much anymore, and don't have much motivation to force myself back into that ecosystem to sell more plugins.”
neutral · production · dangrossman · 2013-11-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use linux for: redis, elasticsearch, HAProxy, DNS (bind), nginx, mail (exim) apache, wordpress, mysql, nexpose, backups, puppet, asterix, android builds and our internal mercurial.”
neutral · production · Nick-Craver · 2013-10-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run `yo genesis-wordpress` on our existing project”
neutral · production · ericclemmons · 2013-10-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“But the blog is wordpress that means PHP”
neutral · production · rehack · 2013-09-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I use them to backup all my social media onto my wordpress blog which in turn is a record of everything that happens to me in my life.”
neutral · personal · Causalien · 2012-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we did not do anything special to WordPress itself.”
neutral · production · tjasko · 2012-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched over to Middleman from Wordpress and we're slowly building it out custom as we go.”
neutral · production · superkinz · 2012-10-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run a relatively small member site (<1000 active members) that operates on WordPress.”
neutral · production · cooperadymas · 2012-10-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I don't want to manage a Web cluster just for Wordpress, so I use WPEngine in production for about 10 sites”
neutral · production · tedchs · 2012-10-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I get work by contact form submissions on my own website (it's just a WordPress blog)”
neutral · production · jamesjguthrie · 2012-09-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“frequently handle top HN stories on our wordpress blog”
neutral · production · wheels · 2011-07-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using a pretty bogus, standard theme for my hosted Wordpress blog”
neutral · personal · jseliger · 2010-10-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?