Why I Stopped Using WordPress

Sun Feb 04 2018

WordPress currently has a bad reputation on the internet. Many people argue that the technology WordPress uses(PHP) is out of date. Tons of people leave WordPress for sites like Wix and squarespace simply because they are easier to use. There are valid points to these arguments. However, I would like to argue that WordPress is honestly not that terrible. There are hundreds of themes and plugins which make WordPress a very robust platform to use. Content management on WordPress is also very easy to manage. It may take more time to set up a WordPress site; however, it is well worth it in the end. WordPress is definitely not the solution for every website, but it is still adequate for blogs.

I did not leave because I hated WordPress, I left simply because I wanted to build something of my own. This blog has been deserted for several years and I decided that it was time to bring it back to life. I decided to totally recreate my blog using Nodejs from the ground up. Going into this endeavor two weeks ago, I knew absolutely nothing about Nodejs other than it was a JavaScript framework for back end web development. I knew a fair amount of JavaScript, so the project went smoothly except for synchronization bugs. Going from PHP development to a Nodejs development took some transitioning, but in the end, I think it was well worth it. I will write a post about the differences between PHP and Nodejs in the future.

You still might not understand why I stopped using WordPress. Personally, I think I left because using WordPress would have been too easy. Don’t get me wrong, GUIs are very nice, but I wanted to know how the blog actually worked. I could have taken the time to learn how to develop WordPress plugins but that would have been a waste of time. Even though I feel that WordPress is a good blogging platform, Nodejs is taking over the web. It is frightening how much stuff you can do with JavaScript. Not only is Nodejs faster than PHP, but you can do front and back end web development with it. There are dozens of blogging platforms written with Nodejs, but I wanted to teach myself how to program Nodejs by taking on a huge project.

If you are interested in the source code for this website, check it out on my github.