Disadvantages, weaknesses, and cons of WordPress

We've been recommending WordPress to customers for years. We have also been telling them for years when  we do not recommend it. The reality is that the world has changed a lot since we published our first post about its disadvantages in 2022, and what was then a quiet reflection has become something much more interesting: a platform that continues to dominate the global market but accumulates more questions than ever about its future.

So we have decided to do a complete overhaul. Pros and cons, with data from 2025 and 2026, without selling smoke or demonizing for free. Let's go there.

Context 2026

Before we get into the matter, a couple of numbers to keep in mind: WordPress moves approximately 43% of all websites in the world and holds around 62% market share among CMSs. Its closest competitor, Shopify, barely reaches 5%. This data is published monthly by W3Techs and has been consistent for years. Of course, as we will see in the cons, the platform has not grown for a long time, and some competitors (Wix, Squarespace) are gaining ground.

ADVANTAGES

1. An unrivaled community and ecosystem

More than 65,000 plugins, tens of thousands of themes, active forums in all languages, WordCamps almost all over the world. WordPress is open source, and that means no one owns it: there are hundreds of thousands of developers who improve, extend, and document it every day. For the end user, that means that virtually any functionality you can imagine already has a proven solution.

This community also ensures that if something goes wrong, the answers are a Google away. That cannot be said by any proprietary CMS or any custom development.

2. Real integration with artificial intelligence

This did not exist when we wrote the original post, and deserves special mention. In 2025, WordPress has become the most active platform in the integration of AI tools: from plugins such as Jetpack AI Assistant (which generates and edits text directly in Gutenberg) to complete solutions such as AI Engine, compatible with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic models. There are also WooCommerce-specific plugins that dynamically adjust prices, generate product descriptions automatically, or manage customer service chatbots with GPT-4o.

AI is entering WordPress just as responsive design once entered: not as a fad, but as a functional layer that can no longer be ignored. And the WordPress ecosystem is by far the one that offers the most options in this regard.

3. Very affordable entrance fee

The software itself is free. The real costs are hosting, the domain, and if necessary, some premium plugins or themes. This allows projects to be launched with reasonable budgets that would be unaffordable for an SME in a tailor-made development. For startups, local businesses, or projects in the validation phase, WordPress remains one of the smartest options on the market.

4. Workable SEO at a very good level

With plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math, and with a well-thought-out architecture from the start, WordPress can be a very powerful SEO platform. There are websites that compete with digital media of reference using only WordPress. The problem (and we'll see this in the cons) is that poorly configured it can be a top-notch SEO disaster. But that is not the fault of the tool, but of the person who configures it.

5. Flexibility and scalability for most projects

From a personal blog to a corporate website with dozens of pages, digital magazines with thousands of articles or online shops with hundreds of products: WordPress covers this spectrum very reasonably. The Gutenberg block editor has matured a lot since 2018 and today allows you to build complex layouts without the need for third-party page builders.

DISADVANTAGES

1. Security is still your Achilles' heel

This has not changed, and in fact the 2025 data confirms it in more detail than ever. According to Patchstack's annual report, 97% of WordPress vulnerabilities originate in plugins and themes, not the core. In the first half of 2025 alone, more than 6,700 vulnerabilities were identified in the ecosystem, of which 41% were classified as exploitable in real attacks. In April of that year, 172 vulnerabilities were reported in 142 different plugins in a single week.

The WordPress core itself has matured and is reasonably secure. The problem is the pieces we add: plugins of dubious origin, themes with unmaintained code, installations that are not updated. Each plugin installed is a potential gateway for someone who is looking to get in.

Remember: Hiring an active maintenance service is not optional if your website has some value for your business. Regular updates, backups, and audits are the minimum required.

2. The default design tends towards the generic

The vast majority of WordPress websites are built from templates. The result is that déjà vu effect  when you browse the internet and see three websites that look the same. If design and visual differentiation are important to your brand (and in most competitive industries they are), you have to take on an additional cost in 100% custom design or work with advanced and professional builders who really master them.

Be careful: this does not mean that with WordPress you cannot make an extraordinary design. It can be done. But it requires investment, and you have to be very critical when assessing budgets. Many agencies sell "unique" design that is actually a tweaked template.

3. Intrusion is still a real problem

The relative simplicity of WordPress has generated a market full of "professionals" who have set up websites for friends and acquaintances and now present themselves as digital agencies. No kidding. In our history we have rescued more projects destroyed by inexperienced hands than we remember. The problem isn't that anyone learns WordPress: it's wonderful that the platform is accessible. The problem is confusing "I know how to install plugins" with "I know how to do digital strategy".

If you invest in your online presence, invest in who builds it for you, too. In websites and digital marketing, cheap can be very expensive.

4. It has clear functional boundaries

WordPress is an excellent tool for what it does well. When a project needs very specific business logic, complex integrations with external systems or highly customized functionalities, the platform begins to show its seams. Forcing it to do things it wasn't designed to do is the quickest path to a slow, unstable, and hard-to-maintain web.

In these cases, a custom development on technologies such as Laravel (PHP) is a better decision in the medium term, even if the initial cost is higher.

5. Not the best option for large e-commerce

WooCommerce is a great solution for small and medium-sized stores. But if we are talking about catalogs with thousands of references, multiple languages and currencies, complex pricing logics or integrations with robust ERPs, things get complicated. Performance suffers, maintenance becomes finicky, and the shopping experience can degrade.

For e-commerce projects of a certain size, platforms such as PrestaShop, Shopify or more powerful solutions such as Adobe Commerce offer a more solid foundation. And for pure e-commerce projects with high traffic volume, Shopify has proven in 2025 to be an alternative that does not stop growing, already with more than 5% of global market share.

6. A client with access can disassemble the website in seconds

WordPress accessibility for the end user is a virtue that becomes a risk when it is not managed well. We've seen websites go down due to poorly executed manual updates, menus that disappear after someone "touched something" in the editor, and entire structures deleted by accident. Setting up a website can take months. Disassemble it, just a few seconds.

The solution is to define the permissions of each type of user well, establish automatic backup routines, and – if there are several people touching the web – train everyone on what they can and cannot do.

7. The Governance Crisis: The Automattic/WP Engine War

This point did not exist in the 2022 post and we cannot ignore it. In September 2024, Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, publicly attacked WP Engine, one of the world's largest WordPress hosting providers, accusing it of profiting from the open source ecosystem without contributing enough. What followed was an ongoing legal dispute, with Automattic cutting off WP Engine's access to WordPress.org and both companies suing each other.

The problem for us (as an industry and as users) is that such a conflict highlights the fragility of relying on a platform where real power is concentrated in a single private company. WordPress is open source, yes. But WordPress.org, the repository of plugins, themes, and updates, is controlled by Automattic. And that generates a dependency that many companies are now reevaluating.

To this day, the conflict remains unresolved and the community is divided. It's not a reason to abandon WordPress, but it's a reason to keep in mind if you're building something for the long term.

Be careful! If your project has a critical dependency on WordPress, it's a good time to do a risk assessment and make sure you have copies, direct access to code, and a plan B.

8. Technical SEO Requires Expert Hands

An unconfigured WordPress installation generates tens – or hundreds – of low-quality pages: categories, tags, taxonomies, files by date, author pages, image versions... If left unchecked, Google indexes them and dilutes the authority of the pages that really matter. This isn't a new problem, but in 2025 — with Google becoming more demanding in terms of content quality — the consequences of ignoring it are more severe than before.

Technical WordPress SEO requires judgment, knowledge, and time. It's not something you set up once and forget about.

Always put it in the hands of an SEO specialist. It is one of the investments with the best return on any web project.

In short,

In 2026, WordPress is still the smartest choice for most standard web projects. Its ecosystem, community, and AI integration keep it far ahead of any alternative in terms of flexibility and cost-effectiveness. If you have a corporate website, a blog, a content project, or a medium-sized online store, WordPress is probably the right answer.

But there are projects where it is not. If you need very specific functionalities, a high-volume e-commerce, or simply value having full control over your platform without relying on third parties, it's worth exploring alternatives. And in all cases there is one constant: the final result depends much more on the people who execute it than on the tool they use.

As we always say: first define what you need, and then decide how and with whom.