For nearly twenty years, WordPress was my answer to almost every website question. Then one day I found myself asking a different question: Do I really need WordPress for every site I build? This chapter tells the story of how that question changed everything.
I started building websites around 2002 or 2003. Back then, creating a good-looking website wasn't easy. If you wanted a website, you had to learn HTML. You needed to know which tags made text bold, which ones made it italic, how to create links, build tables, and center content on a page.
There were tools that helped. My favorite was CoffeeCup HTML Editor. It made the process easier, but you still needed a basic understanding of how websites worked. Building a site often meant spending hours tweaking code and uploading files through FTP.
Then WordPress arrived.
When WordPress was released in 2003, it changed everything. Suddenly, regular people could publish content without learning HTML. You could install WordPress, choose a theme, write an article, and have a functioning website in a matter of hours instead of days.
I embraced WordPress completely.
For nearly two decades, WordPress was my platform of choice. I used it for blogs, business websites, download sites, photo galleries, membership communities, and e-commerce stores. Whenever someone asked me how to build a website, my answer was almost always the same:
"Use WordPress."
One of the biggest reasons was plugins. If you needed a feature, there was probably a plugin for it. Need a gallery? There's a plugin. Need a contact form? There's a plugin. Need memberships, downloads, forums, SEO tools, backups, analytics, or online stores? There were plugins for all of it.
WordPress made website creation accessible, and for many years it deserved its reputation as the world's most popular publishing platform.
But over time, something changed.
As WordPress grew more powerful, it also became more complex.
Today, many WordPress websites rely on dozens of plugins just to achieve what once felt simple. Managing updates became a regular task. Plugin conflicts became more common. Website owners had to think about PHP versions, database backups, security plugins, caching plugins, performance optimization, theme compatibility, and hosting requirements.
None of these things are necessarily bad. In fact, many of them are the result of WordPress evolving into a platform capable of powering everything from personal blogs to large enterprise websites.
The question I eventually started asking myself was this:
Do I really need all of that for every website?
Most of the websites I build today are not large enterprise projects. They are blogs, content sites, churches, ministries, authors, coaches, and small businesses. They need pages, articles, images, and basic search engine optimization. They need to be fast, reliable, and easy to manage.
What they don't always need is the complexity that comes with a modern WordPress installation.
That realization led me to search for something simpler.
I wanted a publishing platform that felt more like the WordPress I remembered from the early days. Something lightweight. Something fast. Something that worked on almost any hosting account. Something focused on publishing instead of managing plugins.
That's ultimately what led me to create FoundryPress.
This book is not an attack on WordPress. I still respect what WordPress has done for the web and the opportunities it created for millions of website owners, developers, and businesses.
Instead, this book asks a simple question:
Do you really need WordPress?
For some people, the answer will absolutely be yes.
For many others, however, there may be a simpler path.