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by lostinthefield 1812 days ago
Wordpress is low-code in the sense that somebody else wrote most of the code already, but it's incredibly high-maintenance. At some point some plugin is going to break or the cache is going to be stale in some obscure way and you're going to have to debug it, and chances are the client added some of their own plugins (if you allowed them) and they all interact in some wonky way leading to a cascade of bugs that only manifest in a perfect storm. Ugh.

(not trying to be snarky here... we're moving away from a LAMP stack just because after deployment it tends to be like 95% devops just to keep the website up and running as plugins get outdated and core deprecates things. It's a drain on dev time. Some Wordpress hosts use screenshot-based autoupdates and compare before & afters, and that helps, but isn't perfect.)
1 comments
codingdave 1812 days ago
I've been running Wordpress blogs and helping people with theirs for a long time, and simply never had that much maintenance to deal with. Sure, if you let them go nuts with plugins it will go wonky, so don't. If they install a plugin that breaks everything, uninstall it and help them figure out a better solution.

Wordpress out-of-the-box just works. Stick to the basics, and you'll be fine. And for the use case of OP, that is exactly what they seem to be talking about - a basic portfolio site. If you need more than the basics, that is when you leave Wordpress. It sounds like you might be getting into trouble because you are pushing Wordpress way past its core use case.

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lostinthefield 1811 days ago
I've never seen a Wordpress site meeting only its "bare use case" that wouldn't have been better served by Wordpress.com itself (the hosted managed service) or Squarespace. The clients who've hired me did so explicitly to push Wordpress past its defaults, whether through the use of something like a page editor (WPBakery/Elementor/etc.) or an events plugin or another or some contact form... those are all basic, common usages that still require maintenance.

If their use was basic blogging, I try to steer them away from needing to hire a dev at all (why spend the money?).

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