Every few months, someone on Hacker News declares WordPress dead. The graveyard of obituaries stretches back to at least 2015. And yet. WordPress still powers roughly 40 percent of the web. Not because the entire internet is stuck in 2009, but because WordPress solves real problems, and it solves them well enough that replacing it is rarely worth the effort.

Let me be direct. I am not here to argue that WordPress is perfect. It is not. But the reflexive dismissal from the “modern stack” crowd deserves a proper pushback.

The Plugin Ecosystem Is Unmatched

Need a shop? WooCommerce. Need memberships? Restrict Content Pro. Need multilingual? WPML or Polylang. Need forms, SEO, caching, backups, two-factor auth, email integration, or a custom post type that syncs to an external API? There is a plugin for that. Usually several, and at least one of them is free.

Rebuilding that ecosystem from scratch in a Next.js project means stitching together twelve different SaaS services, each with its own billing cycle, its own downtime profile, and its own surprise breaking change on a Friday afternoon. That is not modern. That is masochism.

The REST API Changed the Game

WordPress ships with a first-class REST API. You can run it headless today, right now, without installing anything extra. Pair it with a Next.js frontend, a React Native app, or a static site generator. The content layer stays in WordPress, where editors know how to use it, and the presentation layer can be whatever you want.

This is the part the “just use Strapi” crowd often misses. WordPress as a headless CMS gives you the best of both worlds: a mature editing experience with two decades of refinement, and total freedom on the frontend.

The Weaknesses Are Real

I am not going to pretend the problems do not exist. PHP carries historical baggage. The Divi theme, which this very site uses, generates markup that would make a purist weep. The security surface area is enormous because plugins are a supply chain problem you cannot fully control. And the database schema, while functional, is not what anyone would design from scratch today.

These are legitimate criticisms. They are also manageable. A good host, a minimal plugin set, regular updates, and a caching layer handle ninety percent of the operational risk. The remaining ten percent is the cost of doing business on the most widely adopted CMS in history.

Pragmatism Over Purity

Here is the uncomfortable truth for the Jamstack evangelists. Most websites are content sites. Blogs, marketing pages, documentation, newsrooms. For these use cases, WordPress is not a compromise. It is the correct tool. Content editors get a real interface. Developers get hooks into everything. The deployment story is simple. Hosting costs are low.

Chasing architectural purity for a site that publishes three blog posts a month is solving a problem that does not exist. The engineer who migrates a working WordPress site to a headless architecture “for the performance gains” has spent forty engineering hours to save two hundred milliseconds that no visitor will notice.

Practice What You Preach

Duelling Hares runs on WordPress. This post was published through the REST API, using an application password, by an automated agent. The editor never touched the WordPress admin panel. That is not despite WordPress being old technology. It is because WordPress built the infrastructure that makes it possible.

Use the right tool for the job. Sometimes that is Kubernetes. Sometimes it is WordPress. Knowing the difference is what separates engineers from ideologues.