Is WordPress still the obvious choice in 2025?

At Born Digital, we frequently receive project requests specifying WordPress as the required CMS platform.
The Arguments in favor of Wordpress are mostly the same, but perhaps they aren't as clear cut as they seem, so let's look at them from another angle.

Popularity

While it is true that Wordpress is the most used CMS till today. It is also true there is an incline in usage over the last year.

(source: https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/WordPress)

You have to realize Wordpress originated in an age where there weren’t many alternatives. So there is a lot of familiarity there and people tend to be afraid of change.
However in 2025 there are a lot of other solutions available.
Developers and enterprises are leaning to other programming languages and more modern solutions.
DIY web builders are reaching for online no-code tools to quickly create something. 

Free

While Wordpress is open source, making a website with Wordpress is not free.
You will still pay for hosting, used plugins and updates to keep your website secure.

Sure you could hack something together with an existing theme and plugins, but once you need an even semi-professional looking result you will hire an agency to design and develop your website. 

Clicking a website together with plugins

Since the beginning Wordpress has allowed for plugins to add functionality to software. Because of the growth of the Wordpress community, there are now one or more plugins written for almost every possible use case.
This is obviously a huge advantage, however there are also drawbacks.

Plugins for basic functionality 

There is some pretty basic functionality missing from Wordpress. To add them you are relying on external plugins. Which is a problem since the framework and database are not designed and optimized with these functionalities in mind.

Adding extra content types (e.g. news, product, project), adding extra fields that content type (e.g. a date to a news item), use a plugin.
Need translations, use a plugin. 

Need beter load times (through caching or optimizing assets), use a plugin.
In my opinion these are core functionalities and should be part of Wordpress.

Plugin performance

Not all plugins are created equally.
There are some well written plugins out there that are a joy to work with ….. but a lot of them are poorly written.
Adding unwanted bloat or slowness to the site, breaking functionality and filling your admin panel with “buy now” promotional banners.

But what else is there?

We believe in a Headless approach. Using specialized tools for each step of serving a website, picking the right tool for the job, not just the tool that has a plugin written for it.

Clearly the architecture looks very different but what does this picture mean. It boils down to the headless approach separated concerns and responsibilities. Giving you more flexibility, better scalability and more security.
In Wordpress the CMS and front-end are tightly bound together, whereas the headless approach allows to select the best solutions for each part.

What benefits does this have I hear you asking.

Security

Wordpress popularity makes it a popular target for hackers.
Depending on which source you look at, WordPress is responsible for 70% - 90% of hacked websites.

So it is key to keep Wordpress, plugins, themes up to date.
However this requires quite an effort to keep up with, specially since Wordpress doesn’t extinguish between feature and security updates.
When using a headless CMS securing your data is taken care for.

Another weakness of the traditional setup is when you get a sudden rise of visitors, the database could go down and the website will be unreachable

Content distribution

The headless CMS doesn’t care how the data is used. It can feed a website (or multiple websites), web app or phone app.
You are not even limited to 1 data provider either. Want to add a shop? Choose the commerce provider that best suits your situation and the front-end can pull in content from that source to show your products to the visitor.

Modern solutions

Want to use a more optimized front-end framework, select a different headless CMS or decide to create an app that shares content with the website.
Using a headless approach this can be done with a minimum effort.
In Wordpress this will not be possible or will require a huge effort/cost. 

On the CMS side, we often choose Storyblok. This is one of the most editor friendly CMS, allowing the admin to live 

Control

In a headless approach you don’t have the burden of plugins adding functionality, but also bloat to the front-end. Meaning the developer has full control  over what is output to the browser. Allowing a fully custom and optimized experience.