Busting the WordPress Myths That Cost You Real Money

I got a call last week from a potential client. He was frustrated. His agency told him their new, complex e-commerce idea couldn’t be built on WordPress. They said he’d need a “real” platform because of all the common WordPress myths: it’s supposedly insecure, slow, and can’t handle scale. They were about to spend a fortune on some bespoke system, and the whole thing felt off to him. He was right.

Honestly, 10 years ago, I might have parroted some of the same bad advice. I remember one of my first big client sites was crawling. My gut reaction was to blame the platform. “See? WordPress is slow.” Total nonsense. The kicker was a poorly-coded portfolio plugin making about 40 un-cached database calls on every single page load. That wasn’t a WordPress problem. That was an Ahmad problem. The platform was fine; the implementation was the issue.

Let’s Get Real About WordPress Security and Performance

The single biggest myth is that WordPress is insecure. The WordPress core software itself is incredibly secure. It’s vetted by thousands of developers. When vulnerabilities are found, they’re patched fast. The insecurity comes from the ecosystem around it: cheap, unmanaged hosting, plugins abandoned by their developers, and, frankly, lazy password practices. You can’t blame the car for getting stolen when you leave the keys in the ignition and the doors unlocked.

The same goes for performance. A clean WordPress install on a decent server is lightning fast. It slows down when you install a bloated, “do-everything” theme and pile on 30 plugins to add functionality that should have been custom-coded. The platform isn’t the bottleneck; the lack of a proper development strategy is. A lot of these points were touched on in a recent post I saw on the official WordPress blog, but it’s important to understand the why from a developer’s perspective, which you can read more about at https://wordpress.com/blog/2025/11/18/wordpress-myths/.

WordPress is a full application framework. It’s not just for blogs. The REST API and block editor have made it a powerful tool for building anything from headless e-commerce sites to internal business tools. If someone tells you WordPress “can’t” do something, it usually means they can’t do it. For example, here’s how you properly register a custom post type for something like “Projects”—no plugin needed. This is the clean, professional way.

function bbioon_register_project_post_type() {
    $labels = [
        'name'                  => _x( 'Projects', 'Post type general name', 'textdomain' ),
        'singular_name'         => _x( 'Project', 'Post type singular name', 'textdomain' ),
        'menu_name'             => _x( 'Projects', 'Admin Menu text', 'textdomain' ),
        'name_admin_bar'        => _x( 'Project', 'Add New on Toolbar', 'textdomain' ),
        'add_new'               => __( 'Add New', 'textdomain' ),
        'add_new_item'          => __( 'Add New Project', 'textdomain' ),
        'new_item'              => __( 'New Project', 'textdomain' ),
        'edit_item'             => __( 'Edit Project', 'textdomain' ),
        'view_item'             => __( 'View Project', 'textdomain' ),
        'all_items'             => __( 'All Projects', 'textdomain' ),
    ];

    $args = [
        'labels'             => $labels,
        'public'             => true,
        'publicly_queryable' => true,
        'show_ui'            => true,
        'show_in_menu'       => true,
        'query_var'          => true,
        'rewrite'            => [ 'slug' => 'project' ],
        'capability_type'    => 'post',
        'has_archive'        => true,
        'hierarchical'       => false,
        'menu_position'      => null,
        'supports'           => [ 'title', 'editor', 'author', 'thumbnail', 'excerpt' ],
        'show_in_rest'       => true,
    ];

    register_post_type( 'project', $args );
}
add_action( 'init', 'bbioon_register_project_post_type' );

Stop Blaming the Hammer

At the end of the day, WordPress is a tool. A powerful one. In the hands of an experienced developer, you can build a secure, scalable, and complex application that does exactly what you need. In the hands of someone who just installs plugins until the site breaks, you get a mess. The problem isn’t the hammer; it’s how you swing it.

Look, this stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.

So, the next time someone tells you about all the things WordPress can’t do, ask them to show you the code. Trust me on this, the truth is usually right there in the implementation.