WordPress 6.3 shipped last month, and it’s boring, but in a good way! Full site editing got better. The block editor got smoother. Performance improved in places nobody was complaining about. The release notes are competent and unspectacular. And that’s exactly the point.
I was reading through the AI-everywhere coverage last month. Transformers this, large language models that, everyone integrating something with ChatGPT. Meanwhile, WordPress just put out a quarterly update that improved what was there. It didn’t go viral. It didn’t create any think pieces. It just worked.
Your client doesn’t want the newest CMS on the block. They want a CMS that will still work in 18 months without anyone having to rewrite it. They don’t want the shiniest blocks or the fastest block editor. They want to be able to train someone to use it, and have that training stick because the interface doesn’t change every quarter. They want their site to load quickly, not to have three rendering pipelines running in parallel.
WordPress does boring better than almost anything else in the space. It’s the boring you can depend on. The updates come on a schedule you can plan around. The plugins work (most of the time). The security updates happen (if you’re using services to provide this). The hosting is cheap because it’s boring and runs on boring infrastructure. The developer community is enormous because the platform is stable enough that people can build entire careers on top of it.
The counter argument I hear all the time is that boring is holding WordPress back. That we should be doing more with headless, more with block composition, more with AI integration, more with whatever the conference talks were about this season. Some of that is true. WordPress could move faster in certain directions. But then it wouldn’t be WordPress. It would be something else.
And something else would have different trade-offs. A newer framework will have better ergonomics. It will have less technical debt. It will have the latest thinking baked in. It will also have fewer practitioners, less documentation, less proof that it works at scale in production. Bet on it and you’re betting that the community stays interested and the company stays solvent. WordPress has already made that bet and won 20 years in a row.
Boring technology is a feature. It’s not a symptom of stagnation. It’s a symptom of maturity. The best technical decision you can make for a client project is to build it on something so well-established that you don’t have to think about the foundation. You can spend your energy on the hard problems. The business logic. The experience. The things that actually matter to their customers.
Build on WordPress, and 12 months from now you’ll be maintaining WordPress. You won’t be maintaining a framework that had a significant architectural shift. You won’t be rewriting pieces because the vendor pivoted. You won’t be waiting for the library you depend on to actually implement the feature they promised.
Will you miss out on some shiny things? Absolutely. Will you be slower than a custom-built system? Sometimes. Will you have technical debt? Of course. But the flip side is that your team can be smaller, your onboarding is faster, your client can actually update their site without calling you, and the whole thing keeps working.
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