The CMS everyone knows and half of everyone has outgrown

WordPress is the most widely used CMS in the world. That fact shapes almost every conversation about website platforms: if you're not using WordPress, you're often explaining why not. If you are using WordPress, you've probably inherited assumptions about what it can and can't do for your SEO that were formed years ago.

The honest picture is more complicated than "WordPress is great for SEO" or "WordPress is too bloated to compete." It depends heavily on how it's configured, how disciplined the team maintaining it is, and what you're comparing it against.

This article gives you a clear-eyed assessment of WordPress's genuine SEO strengths, its real weaknesses, and the specific circumstances where it may make sense to move to something else.

Where WordPress genuinely earns its SEO reputation

Plugin ecosystem is unmatched

WordPress's SEO plugin options are legitimately best-in-class. Yoast SEO and Rank Math both provide features that would require developer configuration on other platforms: automated XML sitemaps, per-page title and meta description controls, schema markup generation, breadcrumb configuration, canonical tag management, and real-time content analysis tools.

These plugins lower the barrier to SEO execution significantly. A content manager with no technical background can set up proper on-page SEO on a WordPress site without touching a line of code. That's a genuine advantage, and it's why WordPress has maintained its SEO reputation despite technical headwinds.

Enormous developer and content community

If you hit a technical SEO problem on WordPress, there's a tutorial, a Stack Overflow thread, or a plugin that addresses it. That's not true for most platforms. The ecosystem's maturity means that almost every technical SEO configuration challenge has at least a documented solution.

Flexible content architecture

WordPress's custom post types and custom fields allow complex content architectures that many hosted CMSes don't support natively. A municipal website with separate post types for services, staff, events, bylaws, and press releases can model that structure in WordPress without major development expense.

Freedom to self-host and own your stack

Unlike Squarespace, Wix, or even Webflow (for hosted plans), WordPress on your own server gives you full control over server configuration, caching strategy, image delivery, and CDN setup. For teams with the technical expertise to configure it, this translates into meaningful performance control.

Where WordPress creates SEO risk

Plugin bloat and Core Web Vitals

The same plugin ecosystem that makes WordPress powerful also makes it easy to accumulate more plugins than your site can carry. Each plugin that adds frontend JavaScript or CSS to your pages increases the load the browser must process before the page renders. The average WordPress site loads javascript from 20-plus plugins. That's not hypothetical — it's typical.

Core Web Vitals (specifically Largest Contentful Paint and Interaction to Next Paint) are Google ranking signals tied directly to page performance. WordPress sites with plugin-heavy configurations frequently underperform native performance benchmarks. Fixing this requires either disciplined plugin management (choosing lightweight alternatives, auditing quarterly, removing redundancies) or custom development to minimize frontend load — neither of which is straightforward for non-technical teams.

Security maintenance is a continuous obligation

WordPress's popularity makes it a persistent target. Its plugin ecosystem, while powerful, is also a security surface: abandoned plugins, plugins from developers who've stopped maintaining them, and plugins with known vulnerabilities are a real and ongoing risk. A compromised WordPress site can be penalized by Google (removed from the index or flagged with a security warning in search results) within hours of an attack.

Keeping WordPress secure requires: keeping core updated, keeping plugins updated, monitoring for known vulnerability disclosures, and having a plan for what happens when an update breaks something. For teams without a dedicated developer or managed hosting plan, this overhead is easy to underestimate.

Theme complexity and render-blocking resources

Many WordPress themes — including popular commercial themes — load large amounts of CSS and JavaScript that aren't used on any given page. This contributes directly to slower page loads and Core Web Vitals failures. Switching to a leaner theme (like a block theme or a minimal starter) helps, but it requires rebuilding the site's design layer.

Database table sprawl

Long-running WordPress installations accumulate post revisions, transients, and orphaned metadata in the database. This rarely affects SEO directly, but it does affect admin speed and query performance on shared hosting. Regular database maintenance is another operational overhead most teams don't account for initially.

When WordPress is still the right call

WordPress is the right choice when:

You need maximum plugin flexibility. If you're integrating with a specific third-party tool (a niche membership system, a legacy data source, a specific payment processor) and there's a WordPress plugin for it, that's a meaningful advantage over platforms that require custom development.

You have a developer on retainer or in-house. The performance and security concerns are manageable with proper technical resources. If development support is available, WordPress's flexibility is a genuine asset.

You're already on WordPress and the technical debt is manageable. Migrating away from a functional WordPress site has costs (development time, redirect mapping, team retraining, content migration). If the platform is performing reasonably well and the team is comfortable with it, the ROI of migration may not be there.

Your content model is complex. For sites with many distinct content types and complex relationships (a provincial agency with hundreds of programs, services, and resources), WordPress's custom post types can model the structure more cost-effectively than most alternatives.

When to seriously consider moving on

Your Core Web Vitals scores are consistently failing and plugin reduction isn't fixing it. If LCP or INP scores are poor across the site and the underlying cause is theme or plugin architecture, a platform change may deliver better results than incremental optimization.

Security incidents have happened. A site that's been compromised once is more likely to be targeted again, especially if the vulnerability wasn't fully identified. If your team doesn't have the bandwidth for proper security maintenance, a managed platform with automatic updates and security isolation may be safer.

The block editor isn't working for your editorial team. Gutenberg (the block editor, now the dominant WordPress editing experience) is a significant departure from the classic editor. Many content teams find the block paradigm disorienting, especially for long-form structured content. If editorial adoption is suffering, it's a real productivity and content quality problem.

Hosting costs have grown significantly. Shared hosting works at small scale, but as traffic grows, WordPress often requires more expensive infrastructure (managed WordPress hosting, load-balanced servers, object caching). At the point where hosting costs are substantial, it's worth comparing the total cost of ownership against modern alternatives.

Leaner alternatives worth evaluating

This isn't a comprehensive comparison, but these platforms are worth evaluating depending on your situation:

Webflow: Excellent visual editor, strong on performance and built-in accessibility tooling, no plugin architecture to manage. Limited for very complex content models. Better for marketing sites than large-scale content-heavy sites.

Craft CMS: A developer-built, content-modeler-friendly CMS with serious flexibility and a much smaller attack surface than WordPress. Strong for complex content architectures. Requires a developer to set up but gives content teams significant control afterward.

Statamic: Built on the Laravel framework, strong content modeling, flat-file storage option means no database overhead. Growing ecosystem, better Core Web Vitals baseline than WordPress with typical configurations.

Ghost: Purpose-built for publication, extremely fast, excellent SEO defaults out of the box. Less flexible for non-publishing use cases.

The right choice depends on your content needs, your team's technical capacity, and what you specifically need to improve. WordPress is still a reasonable choice for many organizations. It's just not automatically the right one anymore.

If you're unsure whether your current CMS is the right long-term platform for your site's goals, get in touch for an honest assessment.