Why is everything better than WordPress?

I’ve spent a lot of the last couple years taking people off WordPress. Fixing hacked ones, migrating businesses off of it, rebuilding the same sites on things that don’t give me a headache. So when I say everything is better than WordPress, I’m not being cute about it. I’ve tried the alternatives on real jobs for real clients, and almost all of them hurt less.

Let me say what’s actually wrong with WordPress first, because if you’ve never run one you might think I’m exaggerating.

WordPress is a PHP app sitting on a MySQL database, and every page load fires up that whole machine to build the page from scratch. Slow, unless you bolt on caching plugins. It’s also a big target, and the core software isn’t really the problem. The plugins are. A normal WordPress site runs ten or fifteen plugins written by ten or fifteen strangers, and any one of them can be the hole somebody crawls through. I’ve cleaned up the aftermath more times than I’d like. Somebody doesn’t update a plugin for a few weeks, a bot finds it, and now the site is redirecting somewhere nasty or quietly mailing spam off the server.

Then the maintenance. PHP updates, plugin updates, theme updates, and the fun surprise where one update breaks another and the whole site goes white. You’re also logging into wp-admin with a username and password that bots hammer around the clock. Owning a WordPress site feels like owning an old house. Something always needs fixing.

Here’s what I use instead.

Why is Statamic better than WordPress?

Statamic is a CMS that doesn’t keep your content in a database. It keeps it in flat files, and that one difference fixes a lot.

No database means no database to hack, nothing to corrupt, and nothing to back up separately from the site. Your content is just files, so it lives in version control right next to the code. I can see what changed, when, and roll it back if something breaks.

There’s also no plugin swamp. Statamic is built on Laravel, which is a serious, well-maintained foundation, so you’re not taping together a dozen plugins to get basic features. Your client still gets a real control panel to edit their own content, which is the part people actually wanted from WordPress, minus the parts that make WordPress a liability.

You can also export the whole thing to static HTML and serve that. Then the live site is just files on a CDN with no app running for anyone to poke at. Statamic built the site, but it doesn’t have to be running for the site to work.

Why is EmDash better than WordPress?

EmDash is the closest thing on this list to WordPress, and I mean that as a compliment. Real CMS, real dashboard, you edit your content and it shows up live. No rebuild step. Edit a page and the next visitor sees it.

The difference is what it runs on. WordPress runs PHP and MySQL on a server you have to feed and patch. EmDash runs on Cloudflare. The app is a Cloudflare Worker, the database is Cloudflare D1, the images sit in Cloudflare R2, and all of it lives on Cloudflare’s edge network close to the visitor. That’s why the sites I’ve built on it come up in under a second without me doing anything clever.

Security is the big one for me. EmDash has no plugins, so there’s no plugin hole to get hacked through, and a bad plugin is how most WordPress sites actually get hacked. There’s no password login either. You sign in with a passkey, so your fingerprint or face or phone PIN, and there’s nothing for a bot to guess. The database has no public door. With WordPress, MySQL is often reachable, and people get in through exposed ports or a stolen config file. Cloudflare’s database is only reachable through your own app. There’s no connection string sitting on the internet waiting to be found.

I won’t oversell it. The database isn’t magically un-hackable, and you still have to write careful code to avoid the usual injection mistakes. But EmDash is one clean codebase instead of WordPress plus fifteen plugins. Far fewer places for things to go wrong. You’re not hardening a mess, you’re running something small that was built right.

Why is a static Astro website better than WordPress?

Sometimes a business doesn’t need a CMS at all. They need a fast, good-looking site that barely changes, and they want me to handle updates when it does. For that I build with Astro and deploy it static.

A static Astro site is just HTML, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript, built once and served as plain files. No app running, no database, no login page on the live site. An attacker can pick at a folder of HTML files all day and find nothing to break into. The attack surface is basically zero.

It’s also about as fast as a website gets. Static files off Cloudflare’s network come up almost instantly no matter where the visitor is, with no caching plugins to configure and no server to outgrow when traffic spikes.

The tradeoff is real and I’ll be straight about it. A static site doesn’t give the client a dashboard, so changes come through me. Plenty of small businesses prefer that. They don’t want to learn a CMS, they want to text me the new hours and have it done. If they do want to edit things themselves down the road, that’s when I move them to EmDash or Statamic. But for a clean site that needs to load fast and never get hacked, static Astro is tough to beat.

So which one?

They all beat WordPress, in different ways. Static Astro is the fastest and safest but the client can’t self-edit. Statamic hands them a control panel and keeps the content in files. EmDash gives them the full edit-in-a-dashboard experience on infrastructure that doesn’t fall over or get hacked through some plugin nobody updated.

What they share is the thing that matters. None of them is a creaky app glued to a database and held together with plugins, waiting on the one you forgot to patch. That’s the WordPress trap. Getting people out of it is most of what I do.